The Most Precious Freedom Is Inner Freedom

By Deepak Chopra, ™ MD

There’s a spiritual concept that seems to create a good deal of confusion. It goes by the name of freedom or liberation, both terms referring not to political freedom but inner freedom. The reason that “freedom” has a spiritual meaning is that a state of total freedom is possible. The confusion arises because at first glance we already feel free inside, most of the time, at least. Our thoughts and feelings are our own. We can be persuaded or coerced to change our minds, but in the end, we decide for ourselves.

In reality, most people experience only a taste of inner freedom. They exist in a state of limitation that is far removed from total freedom. I discuss the desirability of total freedom in my new book, Total Meditation, and I’d like to offer a preview here.

We cannot be free inside if some experiences frighten or distress us. We shut out and deny them, and as a result, many if not most experiences get edited, censored, forgotten, and pushed aside in favor of a narrow band of experience that feels safe. Limited freedom is based on what you can reasonably expect from life. Total freedom begins by looking on life as a field of infinite possibilities. It takes some persuasion to make total freedom seem like more than a pipe dream, however. Is it even desirable to feel totally open, unbounded, and free of boundaries to keep us safe?

A key issue here is spontaneity. Spontaneity is without rules, which seems like a recipe for anarchy. Rule enforcement is the surest way to keep people in line, or so the rule enforcers believe. Consider the extreme example of applying to the bank for a personal loan in China. If you want a loan there, you can use your smartphone, and online lending agencies check you out electronically, using data stored in the cloud. An applicant gets accepted or rejected for a loan in one-tenth of a second, after the lending agency has checked out 5,000 (!) personal factors, including how firmly your hand moved when you filled out your application and how low you let your phone battery get before recharging it.

Each of us is happy to enforce rules upon ourselves—we don’t need an authority figure to do it for us. Self-discipline and impulse control are considered desirable as marks of a mature adult. There’s a famous experiment in child psychology in which a youngster is placed in a chair with a marshmallow on a table in front of them. The child is told they can eat the marshmallow right now, but if they wait five minutes, they will be given two marshmallows. The experimenter then leaves the room and watches what unfolds through a two-way mirror. Some children fidget, fighting the impulse for immediate gratification. Others grab the marshmallow instantly or wait patiently until the five minutes is up. (You can view their behavior on an endearing YouTube video, “The Marshmallow Test.”)

This experiment implies that we already have a predisposition toward impulse control (or not) from a very early age. However, many of life’s greatest gifts involve spontaneity, including falling in love, appreciating beauty, composing music, making art, being surprised with “Aha!” moments, and having so-called peak experiences.

How can we make spontaneity be life-enhancing without the need to suppress it? The solution is to stop imposing limitations in the first place. This is possible only from the level of total consciousness. Everyone is divided inside between what is permitted and what is forbidden. You can’t resolve this conflict at the level of awareness dictated by the divided self.

The war we have with ourselves takes place in the divided self. All manner of judgments, beliefs, fear of bad consequences, memories of past embarrassment, and socially trained inhibitions are entangled together inside us. Trying to resolve each conflict one at a time is pointless and fated to fail. When we try to decide how spontaneous we want to be we confront the fact that the divided self doesn’t really trust itself.

Happily, everyone enjoys enough freedom to enjoy moments of spontaneity, and if we are awake enough, we can experience laughter, joy, and playfulness our entire life (if only this were the norm). The deeper spiritual truth holds that freedom is absolute. When you are settled in yourself and there are no more dark places to fear, nothing hides out of sight. The damaging effect of self-suppression lessens with every step you take to get rid of self-judgment. Bad behavior grows only more enticing when it is forbidden, like leaving the cookie jar out but telling a little child not to grab a cookie. We all know what happens when the mother’s back is turned.

Right now you are both your own rule enforcer and a rebel against the rules. It takes a journey into consciousness to become undivided. You are not designed to prosecute and defend yourself at the same time. You are designed so the next thing you want to do is the best thing for you. That’s a radical rethinking of what society tells us to believe, but when you adopt a lifestyle based on consciousness, reality will dawn. Spontaneity is the essence of life and the soul of creativity.

 


DEEPAK CHOPRA™ MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a modern-day whole health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. Chopra is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is the author of over 90 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His 90th book, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, unlocks the secrets to moving beyond our present limitations to access a field of infinite possibilities. For the last thirty years, Chopra has been at the forefront of the meditation revolution and his next book, Total Meditation (Harmony Book, September 22, 2020) will help to achieve new dimensions of stress-free living and joyful living. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.” www.deepakchopra.com

The Matrix Is Real, and It Is Here

By Deepak Chopra, ™ MD

When the Matrix movies first gained immense popularity in 1999, the notion of an imaginary world in which everyone was enslaved seemed just that, imaginary. Pop culture didn’t look deep enough to reveal that ancient tradition of Maya, the Sanskrit term for an all-enveloping illusion that, for real, envelops all of us. When Maya was discussed, it belonged to an exotic worldview that no modern person in the West gave much credence to.

But that’s how illusion keeps us entranced, by making it seem, as in the brilliant movies, that the matrix constitutes real life. Clearly a better explanation is needed in order to convince the average person, not so much that we all live in a dream/spell/illusion, but that it can be escaped. I discuss what it means to escape the illusion in my new book, Total Meditation. Here I’d like to give a capsule preview of why the real-life matrix matters to everyone.

The most necessary role of the human brain is to present a picture of reality that fits our needs, or to be more accurate, the needs of our ancestors in the hominid lineage. The primary need was for survival, which Darwinians break down into two elements, food and mating. But clearly there were other needs that separated hominids out from other mammals, including shelter and a peaceful community at the physical level. Far more crucial, however, was the emergence of human needs that are primarily a matter of higher consciousness. These include free will, language, art, writing, love, compassion, altruism, creativity, and above all, self-awareness.

These qualities make us human, and in the process of evolving, they became completely entangled in a unified setup we can call the matrix or Maya—terminology isn’t important here. The important thing, which the movie got right, is that you and I are the matrix. We are not in it, nor is there any separation between the things we perceive “out there”—rocks, trees, buildings, sky, other people—and the things we perceive “in here”—thoughts, sensations, images, and feelings. So seamless is the matrix that countless people go through life accepting it on appearance alone.

This, in fact, is the basis of scientific inquiry, which gives primary importance to physical objects as the basis of reality. With all respect to the incredible advances of science and technology, such a worldview is only a convenient fiction, the very fiction that the dream/spell/illusion has thrown us into all the way back to our survival instincts. What motivation do we have, then, for trying to escape? The answer lies outside the matrix, because once you are the matrix, you can’t escape unless you find a way to escape yourself.

The key word here is “self.” When the doctrine of Maya arose in India’s ancient past, it was unlike any other concept, thought, teaching, or everyday fact. Nor was it a religious notion or someone’s stroke of genius. Instead, there was a natural relationship to Maya that we have lost. It was the relationship of a creator to his/her creation. Realizing that the human mind had constructed the matrix, the ancient rishis kept in mind that being fooled by your own creation isn’t desirable. But everyday life was beset by amnesia. No one looked at himself and said, “this whole world is something my mind created.

Maya had been around as long as anyone could remember, and for evolutionary purposes it worked very well, as witness the immense creations of civilization. But there was a fly in the ointment. The continuity that makes the matrix so convincing had holes in it. I’ll name three:

  • No one could say where the human mind came from. To this day no one can point to how a thought arises, or even, strictly speaking, what a thought is.
  • Pain and suffering seems to be universal, and yet so-called lower animals didn’t exhibit existential pain and suffering. Why do we?
  • Self-awareness kept asking, “Who am I?”

Once you verbalize them, these flaws or holes in the whole setup smack of philosophy. But in reality they did not emerge from abstract thinking. There was just this sense that couldn’t be explained. This sense was common enough that when ordinary people asked—and still ask —“Is this all there is?”, they said no.

Only when you go into the vague sense that there must be something more to life do you arrive at the secret of human existence—hidden evolution. Hidden from the sight of the physical world, the human mind kept evolving thanks to several factors that are easy to recognize once you look at yourself closely. These factors are all part of our consciousness, built into it without anyone creating them. They include

  • Curiosity and a thirst for discovery
  • Creativity
  • Inspiration and insight
  • Attraction towards the source
  • Wholeness of the self

No one would be surprised by the first three things on the list, but the last two require some explanation. All cultures contain myths, religion, and metaphysics. The word “god” needn’t be dragged in, because the common denominator isn’t religion but the source of religion. Built into human awareness is a pull or attraction toward the very source of our own awareness. This isn’t a mystical notion. The universal evidence of seeking a higher reality has existed from the beginning. Some cultures took this impulse and looked outward for gods and goddesses, but India looked inward and explored consciousness itself, using as the only tool simple, everyday self-awareness.

The same opportunity still exists, as I discuss at length in Total Meditation. The other factor, wholeness of the self, needs explanation because as modern people, we are conditioned to occupy a divided and fragmented self. We identify with a reality divided into “in here” and “out there,” which makes sense when you have to hunt to survive—a keen sense of what lies “out there” mustn’t be clouded by inner moods, fears, and distractions. The problem is that once people got deeply immersed in “out there,” the divided self forgot that it was an evolutionary convenience, not the actual nature of the self.

Sit quietly for a moment and sense who you are. Effortlessly and naturally you are simply here, and your sense of self is your knowledge that you exist. To be conscious and to exist go together. They are the creative foundation of the matrix, not the movie’s unholy, malignant machinery that babies get plugged into. The simple sense of self needs nothing to justify its existence. Not even evolution is on the table; there is no agenda beyond to be here now.

And yet the sense of self, tapping into the source of consciousness, gave us every human value, every civilization, every scrap of art, science, and technology. Crucially, it now offers an escape route from the divided self and all the pain and suffering created by being trapped in the matrix. The message of Total Meditation is simple: you are the source and substance of the matrix, but you don’t have to be identified with it. That in many ways is the ultimate promise, the only one that counts in everybody’s life.

 

 


DEEPAK CHOPRA™ MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a modern-day whole health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. Chopra is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is the author of over 90 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His 90th book, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, unlocks the secrets to moving beyond our present limitations to access a field of infinite possibilities. For the last thirty years, Chopra has been at the forefront of the meditation revolution and his next book, Total Meditation (Harmony Book, September 22, 2020) will help to achieve new dimensions of stress-free living and joyful living. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.” www.deepakchopra.com

The Blissful Life and You

By Deepak Chopra, ™ MD

When the great American mythologist Joseph Campbell first used the phrase, “Follow your bliss,” he inspired many people. He held out a vision that was radically different from the notion that hard work, persistence, and keeping your shoulder to the wheel was the key to success. But actually, achieving this new vision didn’t prove to be easy.

Campbell’s underlying intention had mythical and spiritual roots. This is clear when you read a bit more about his advice. “If you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you.” This is where people get confused and frustrated, however. They have something they love to do, but the invisible track doesn’t show up. Or what they love to do might have absolutely no financial aspect. What then?

I wanted to clarify what the blissful life actually is, which motivated me to write my latest book, Total Meditation. The key, I believe, to finding your bliss is knowing where to look. There is a source of bliss in everyone that can guide the choices you make. The track to follow isn’t mystical. When the mind settles down in meditation, there is contact with the deeper qualities of consciousness. Bliss is one quality, but simply feeling joyful, carefree, and light, which is the feeling of bliss, carries no greater meaning without other qualities of awareness that are contacted at the same time.

The qualities include creativity, intelligence, intuition, and inner growth. When they become real experiences, the track to a blissful life is open and can be followed. Here arises a second puzzle. How do you know you are on the right track? Do you drop your job as an accountant, office manager, or salesperson and jump immediately into opera singing, painting, or raising roses? That’s not what Campbell is actually saying. “Follow your bliss” points inward, to a pre-existing state of bliss that has the power to bring transformation.

As Campbell defines the goal, “…the life you ought to be living is the one you are living.” Because the goal isn’t very near in most people’s life, there have to be steps along the path. In Total Meditation I outline these steps quite simply. Your mind has creative intelligence and bliss as its source. Therefore, your mind will move closer to its source if you give it a chance. Not much progress can be made if you meditate only occasionally. The path is more like following a trail of breadcrumbs out of the forest; you reconnect with the path by small increments, and there need to be many of them to keep you on course.

This again is simple, because any time you notice that you are distracted, worried, stressed, or starting to feel overwhelmed, you can stop, find a quiet place, and spend a few minutes of quiet meditation until you feel centered again. Do this as often during the day as you need to. You will be allowing your mind to find the settled state it wants to be in naturally.

Will this simple practice, which I call total meditation, instantly give you a blissful life? Very likely it won’t, but you will be on the path that makes a blissful life not just possible but very probable. That’s because what Campbell had in mind goes back thousands of years. He had gleaned from his deep knowledge of world mythology a belief that consciousness creates change in a way inexplicable to reason alone.

He makes this point quite clearly: “Follow your bliss, don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.” In other words, step into the unknown and make an ally of uncertainty. Here the inspiration of “follow your bliss” runs into a psychological block. Countless people have had glimpses of what a spiritual life can be. Who hasn’t experienced love, compassion, inspiration, beauty, and joy some time in their life?

But these scattered glimpses are far from organized and integrated into normal life. That’s why we always return to what is familiar, routine, tried and true. We fear uncertainty; we have no desire to step into the unknown. I address this fear in the book not by ramping up a person’s motivation but by making it clear that consciousness moves fear away by itself. You don’t have to commit acts of bravery (of reckless folly). In effect, your vision of a blissful life unfolds on its own, because everything that is organized and integrated in your life already depends upon consciousness.

You can only change what you are aware of. The unseen doors that will open aren’t a figment of Campbell’s imagination, nor is the biblical injunction of “knock and the door will be opened.” In both cases the lesson is that when you become fully aware, the organizing power to bring solutions, answers, and opportunities is actually built into your awareness. Instead of using a mind that works at the level of the problem, your mind works at the level of the solution.

If these things are true, then the spiritual life is also the most productive, successful, and blissful life. That’s a vison worth experimenting with. In the book I detail how this vision applies to each reader and what it takes to produce change in the direction of bliss consciousness. But I wanted to give a nod to Campbell here, because I was one of those who were inspired so many years ago by his famous phrase. Following your bliss is a notion that opened many doors for me, and I believe it remains valid for countless people today.

 


DEEPAK CHOPRA™ MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a modern-day whole health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. Chopra is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is the author of over 90 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His 90th book, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, unlocks the secrets to moving beyond our present limitations to access a field of infinite possibilities. For the last thirty years, Chopra has been at the forefront of the meditation revolution and his next book, Total Meditation (Harmony Book, September 22, 2020) will help to achieve new dimensions of stress-free living and joyful living. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.” www.deepakchopra.com

How Wholeness Works – The Vanishing “I”

By Deepak Chopra, ™ MD

Holistic health, diet, and medicine have made the term “holistic” more familiar today. The era when anything “holistic” was considered fringe is long past. But the central concept of wholeness remains misunderstood. You cannot aim to be whole, learn to be whole, or make yourself whole. You are already whole as far as your body is concerned. There is constant unified coordination between trillions of cells that organize thousands of organic processes into a working whole.

Understanding organic wholeness in complete detail is beyond anyone’s current intellectual grasp, and is likely to remain that way. The only working model of a neuron, it has been said, would be a neuron. The brain resists any simple reduction, in other words. But the wholeness of mind and spirit is even more baffling, as I address in a new book, Total Meditation. I based the title on practical consideration, to distinguish how meditation can be holistic rather than occasional.

Countless people start meditating only to quickly drop it or else to return to it when their day is particularly stressful. I think this high dropout rate can be turned around simply by offering simpler techniques that encourage the mind to do what it naturally wants to do, which is to stay in balance all the time, regardless of daily pressure, stress, worries, and overwhelm. These challenging times make the need even more urgent.

But there’s a deeper message about meditation that has barely been received despite the popularity of Yoga and meditation in general. This deeper message has to do with wholeness and how it works. In the ancient Indian tradition, two diametrically different approaches reached the same aim, which is to exist in wholeness as your normal, constant state. The first technique (known in Sanskrit as Neti, Neti) works by the process of elimination. The word Neti translates as “not this,” referring to the false identity we carry around with us.

The ego, the everyday “I” that we automatically refer to, is built up as an accumulation of experience and memory. “I” can be defined as a collection of tags, such as age, gender, race, religion, income, marital status, etc. The tags are endless, and we unthinkingly collect more of them as life unfolds, so that “I” feels unique, accomplished, complete, and whole. But if looked at closely, you are not these tags. Winnow them down one by one—“I am not this, not that, not this, not that”—and that objectified “I’ begins to shrink.

The ego’s wholeness is a thin disguise for what really exists, a sense of self that has no contents, memories, inclinations, beliefs, prejudices, hopes, wishes, and fears. These are add-ons to something much simpler: a sense of self. Without applying any of the elaborate trappings that “I” requires in order to keep the focus on itself, your sense of self has been silently present throughout your life. Eliminate what is illusory, and what you are left with it real. In this case, Neti, Neti has led to wholeness as an all-embracing consciousness that needs no temporary identities of the kind we all accumulate from infancy onward.

The opposite procedure expands your awareness until it is unbounded. The most common Sanskrit formula for this is “Tat Tvam Asi,” which translates as “You are That,” where “that” is the infinite field of awareness. Instead of winnowing out illusions, this is a process of going beyond boundaries. In meditation the mind ceases to be active and finds itself drawing closer to its source, which is the simple state described in the pop phrase “Be here now.” Aside from anything your mind is doing. You exist here and now.

The implications of this apparently empty statement are immense. Being here now sounds passive, even inert (like a Pet Rock) but it is far from that. In reality very few people exist in the present moment. They are preoccupied with the same ego demands that Neti, Neti seeks to discard. The active mind is too absorbed in thoughts, feelings, memories, desires, fears, and habits to really know itself. In a way that most of us don’t recognize, we haven’t really met ourselves, because if we did, the essence of “be here now” would dawn on us.

This essence is the infinite pure consciousness form which reality rises. Compared to infinity, the ego is barely a speck of dust, so Tat Tvam Asi, despite being the complete opposite of Neti, Neti, leads to the same end. The incredible shrinking ‘I” is eclipsed so that wholeness can predominate. The terminology is secondary here. What I argue in Total Meditation is that wholeness should be understood as the true basis of human life. I don’t claim that this is so through any arcane metaphysics.

Instead, there is only a single proposition that needs to be brought to light, experienced, and tested. The proposition is this: Existence is consciousness. The two are the same. The physical world didn’t evolve through some chemical or electromagnetic chicanery to allow consciousness to emerge. Consciousness isn’t an add-on, because nothing is more basic. What is literally true is that reality is consciousness modifying itself into space, time, matter, and energy. This is the setup for the human gift of self-awareness. Every living thing participates in wholeness, because by definition wholeness excludes nothing.

The only other thing that excludes nothing is existence. Exclusion takes place in the human mind, which adopts beliefs, habits, and conditioning on behalf of the ego’s agenda. The ego’s agenda, which we all know quite well, is to get more for “I, me, mine” through the increase of pleasure and the decrease of pain. Most people are so unsuccessful at this that the ego has to keep promising that fulfillment is just around the next corner. In fact, the ego setup is deficient and false to begin with.

The only valid setup is consciousness as the all-pervading source, from which the qualities of life we most value spring, including love, compassion, creativity, intelligence, beauty, truth, and personal growth. As “I” begins to grow less significant, its agenda shrinks, and eventually the provisional identity we call “I,” the separate isolated self, vanishes altogether. When that happens, the worst trappings of “I”—self-doubt, insecurity, dread, fear of death, free-floating anxiety, and depression—no longer exist. They have nothing to hang on to anymore.

Because wholeness is who we are, the twin processes of Neti, Neti and Tat Tvam Asi cannot help but be compatible, and if correctly carried out, they are effortless. The first step is to straighten out what wholeness actually is. Words make a start, but the experience of meditation is just as essential. With knowledge and experience the path to reality is opened, and it becomes possible to live in the light in the fullest, truest sense. Everyone is cordially invited to join an immersive and livestream experience about Total Meditation on September 22nd. totalmeditationlive

 


DEEPAK CHOPRA™ MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a modern-day whole health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. Chopra is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is the author of over 90 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His 90th book, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, unlocks the secrets to moving beyond our present limitations to access a field of infinite possibilities. For the last thirty years, Chopra has been at the forefront of the meditation revolution and his next book, Total Meditation (Harmony Book, September 22, 2020) will help to achieve new dimensions of stress-free living and joyful living. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.” www.deepakchopra.com

A One-Minute Lesson in Higher Consciousness

By Deepak Chopra,™ MD

Although meditation has become widely popular, higher consciousness baffles and intimidates people. It seems like a faraway exotic attainment, and perhaps more myth than reality. But higher consciousness is just a convenient catch-all for expanded awareness. Reaching any higher state depends on a simple, very basic axiom: You cannot change what you are not aware of. Grasping this statement takes only a minute, but the point is critically important.

To be aware is also called being mindful. It is very desirable to be mindful. It keeps you in the present moment. It involves being alert and open to new experiences. Mindfulness is detached: you are open to the present moment but are not attached to any outcome that you either desire or fear.

Yet mindfulness has a built-in catch. How do you remind yourself to be mindful when you have drifted away from the present moment? Mindfulness is the very state you are not in. Telling someone to be mindful is like saying “Don’t forget to remember.” Fortunately, you can get past the catch. It involves the simple act of noticing. Your mind is designed to notice things all the time and sending the signal to you.

When you notice a friend in the crowd or something appetizing on a restaurant menu or an attractive stranger, what actually happens? You flick a switch and start to pay attention. The thing you notice is selected from lots of other things you are not noticing. When you see a friend in the crowd, you ignore the other people all around.

The one-minute lesson, which you can adopt immediately, is

  1. Notice when you feel distracted, stressed, angry, anxious, or otherwise out of tune. Don’t dismiss this perception.
  2. Pause. Whatever you are about to say or do, whatever reaction you are in the middle of, back away from it.
  3. Put your attention in the middle of your chest in the region of the heart, close your eyes, and take a few deep breaths until you return to the situation with a clear mind.

These steps are simple, but noticing can be extremely powerful. You have found the key to change, following the axiom that what you are not aware of, you cannot change. By noticing, you give awareness an opening that it doesn’t otherwise have.

Noticing can change the course of history, as in 1928 when the Scottish medical researcher Alexander Fleming returned from vacation to find, much to his annoyance, that green mold has spoiled some open dishes of cultured bacteria. Instead of reacting as he and other researchers always had, simply throwing out the tainted specimens, Fleming noticed, paused to think, and realized, in a stroke of awareness, that he was observing a powerful killer of bacteria. Penicillin was born from an observation made hundreds of times before but without truly noticing what was going on.

Noticing doesn’t simply flick a switch; it invites you to rethink, reframe, and go deeper than your normal reaction.  In an instant, you call upon the mind’s natural ability to reflect. We do not notice at random. Instead, we notice:

  • Something we’re looking for
  • Something we judge against
  • Something we fear
  • Something we might be attracted to
  • Something that offers an explanation or solution

These are the ingredients in everyone’s agenda, even though no two agendas match. In my new book, Total Meditation, I outline the best agenda for effortlessly nurturing higher consciousness.

The best agenda is to promote your personal growth by noticing opportunities to be more conscious. Catching yourself doing something unconsciously is an important part of this agenda. But there are also other dimensions of the total meditation agenda:

  • Notice when someone else needs attention and appreciation.
  • Notice an opportunity to give or be of service.
  • Notice an opportunity to be kind.
  • Notice when help is needed.
  • Notice beauty in Nature.

Setting your inner agenda to take advantage of such opportunities helps reset your deeper awareness. Like the internal clock that notices what time it is even when you are asleep, deeper levels of consciousness know much more than your thinking mind does. In particular, your deeper awareness is the source of the most valued things in human existence: love, compassion, creativity, curiosity, discovery, intelligence, and evolution.

Set your agenda to any of these things and it will turn into opportunities that you begin to notice more and more. Alexander Fleming was primed to discover penicillin because he was already a noted researcher with important findings to his credit. A loving mother is already primed to notice if her child feels unwell, something that might escape the attention of a negligent parent.

To notice is to open the door of awareness. What you do after that is up to you. In total meditation you notice much more than you did before, but there is no obligation to act in a certain away. Consciousness can accomplish anything, but consciousness is its own reward.

In daily life, shifting your inner agenda also involves getting past the kind of noticing that doesn’t serve your personal evolution. Noticing other people’s faults, being on the lookout to correct someone else, assigning to ourselves the role of rule enforcer, or judging people as winners or losers are wrong uses of noticing. There’s no getting around the fact that agendas have a dark side. It is hard to notice something without immediately judging it.

In total meditation, it is important to be aware of your judgments but not act on them. We are all too practiced in likes and dislikes, acceptance and rejection, attraction and aversion. These opposites dominate our inner agendas. But simply by favoring a new agenda, you can change, and in time what you notice will more and more be self-enhancing. Freedom from judgment begins by not favoring judgments you know are negative. Noticing isn’t random. You can begin right now to notice opportunities to wake up. This alone is enough to greatly accelerate your personal evolution.

 


DEEPAK CHOPRA™ MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a modern-day whole health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. Chopra is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is the author of over 90 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His 90th book, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, unlocks the secrets to moving beyond our present limitations to access a field of infinite possibilities. For the last thirty years, Chopra has been at the forefront of the meditation revolution and his next book, Total Meditation (Harmony Book, September 22, 2020) will help to achieve new dimensions of stress-free living and joyful living. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.” www.deepakchopra.com