The Planetary Biome: A New Theory of Life and Survival

By Deepak Chopra™ MD and Rudolph E. Tanzi, PhD

The global pandemic has disrupted everything we call normal life. The disruption has been so catastrophic that there is fear among experts that this is only a “starter pandemic.” COVID is less infectious than the measles and less fatal than SARS. Instead of using this fact to stoke fear, we can do a great deal to heed COVID’s wakeup call.

A new way of looking at life itself holds out hope and optimism, because the popular image of deadly viruses assaulting humans like microscopic aliens is incorrect. Microbes are the very basis of life. We interact with them constantly, and much more than 99% of the time life is enhanced. Every advanced life form, including us, has microbial DNA woven into its own genome. A vast colony of bacteria known as the microbiome together with viruses (the virome) and fungi (the mycobiome) that inhabit every animal’s digestive tract, and when it comes to mammals, the microbiome not only makes digestion possible, but it connects us to the planetary biome—the totality of viruses, bacteria, and fungi that truly rules the earth.

It is a very benign rule. Look around at the astonishing diversity of life that evolution has produced. Evolution in higher life forms is the visible outcome of activity in the planetary biome. To keep the creation of new life beneficial, as it has been for billions of years, the first lesson of the new model is to realize that we are life itself. Our actions affect Nature directly in ways that either enhance life or lead it into destructive patterns.

If we look at COVID as a response, or even a message from the planetary biome, what is the message about? It is about disruption and imbalance. The microbial world responds quickly, at times instantly, to aberrant conditions. Fortunately, it can also respond quickly to rebalance itself, since balance is the natural tendency of every level of life.

Human beings are responsible for imbalance and disruption in many ways, most of them the product of modern life. We can begin with viruses. The earth has a global virome, which is currently being mapped at Stanford. This Earth database, once completed, which also allow us to identity the viruses in the human virome.

As in the human virome (and the microbiome and mycobiome), there can be dysbiosis, when one microbe goes out of balance and becomes opportunistic, amplifying itself at the expense of others. On a larger scale, humans, among all mammalian species, are being opportunistic as we remove forests and wetlands and pollute the land and oceans, leading to an unprecedented rate of extinction of species.

The novel COVID virus was most likely introduced into humans from other mammals as we insist on eating food from species that are too close to our genetic makeup (a notorious example being China’s so-called wet markets). By design in our evolution, the human microbiome prefers plants (our teeth, stomach acid, colon structure, and our need for plant fiber to feed our gut microbiome all support this conclusion).

The consumption of animals, especially mammalian species that are genetically more similar to humans, leads to putrefaction and microbial dysbiosis. As we make ourselves sick, we also propagate the production of opportunistic bacteria that disrupt the earth’s microbiome. Through the same meat diet we also propagate viruses and fungi that disrupt the earth’s virome and mycobiome. Our disruption extends to inducing and accelerating new mutations across all species on Earth with increasing levels of pollution at the chemical, electromagnetic, and radioactive levels.

As essential as electricity is to modern life, our pollution-generating activities accelerate mutation in ourselves as well as in life forms below us. We, and the planet as a whole, are healthiest when we create maximal evolutionary and genetic distance in our food chains. “Genetic distancing” is now needed more than ever. Otherwise, our many activities that pollute the earth first accelerate the introduction of new mutations in viruses and bacteria in ourselves and in other mammals (we aren’t the only species susceptible to COVID, for example). Then we eat these other mammals and disrupt our own microbiomes with new infections, some of which are potentially fatal.

The message from the pandemic won’t be received immediately or completely understood and accepted. But hope arises because the planetary biome is the true foundation of life and the ecology that entangles all living things. Humans are the pivot point, now and in the future. We are the mirror of the earth and of life itself. A conscious alliance with the evolutionary gifts of the biome opens the way for a future free of pandemics and many disorders that can be treated from the microbial level on up to cells, tissues, and the whole person. The potential in medicine alone is enormous. What we need to do now is to take this new model seriously and to learn how best of live as part of the planetary biome.

 

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
Dr. Rudolph E. Tanzi is the Kennedy Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School and Vice-Chair of Neurology and Co-Director of the McCance Center for Brain Health at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Tanzi has discovered numerous Alzheimer’s disease genes, including the first one, and is developing new Alzheimer’s therapies using human mini-brains pioneered in his laboratory. Dr. Tanzi has published 600 research papers, received numerous awards and was on the 2015 TIME100 Most Influential People in the World list. He has also co-authored several books, including “Decoding Darkness” and three bestsellers with Deepak Chopra: “Super Brain”, “Super Genes”, and “The Healing Self”. In his spare time, he plays keyboards with guitarist, Joe Perry of Aerosmith and other musicians.

What It Takes to Live in the Present Moment

By Deepak Chopra,TM MD

The allure of living in the present moment is popular but also endangered. The pandemic lockdown has forced millions of people into cramped living conditions that disrupt normal life, puts strain on relationships, adds stress to families, and introduces depression and anxiety. Escaping the present moment is likely to be everyone’s dream.

But the situation will eventually change, and phrases like “the power of now” are embedded in people’s aspirations. The present moment has wound up being a problem and a solution at the same time. The most basic question needs answering, then. Why live in the present moment and how is it achieved?

Sometimes the present moment brings experiences of love, kindness, creativity, beauty, and insight. In those moments no one needs to ask why it’s good to live in the now. (The body’s trillions of cells, including brain cells, don’t ask the question, because they are designed to only live in the present, occupied with thousands of chemical reactions and electrical signaling every second. Even when you recall a past event, your brain is strictly confined to the now in order to retrieve the memory.)

The first thing to notice when you are overtaken by the now is that you didn’t have to work for it. The present moment is always present. The real question is why we aren’t in the present moment. Countless people ae working hard on themselves to stay in the now. But if it takes no work to get a glimpse of the beauty, love, and fulfillment that dawns in the present moment, can we expect that working to get back there is really necessary, or even effective?

If you break the whole thing down, the difference is between a temporary experience of the present moment and a constant, unbroken experience. The now is either sometimes or all the time. Sometimes is what all of us experience, those passing moments of bliss, love, beauty, etc. I’d argue that these privileged experiences come and go of their own accord. They are as unpredictable as your next thought.

This doesn’t preclude working on yourself to expand your awareness through meditation and yoga, going inside to heal old wounds, rising yourself of self-judgment, and all the other things people do in the human potential movement. If you are stuck in worry, depression, fear of aging and death, and other kinds of stuckness that create pain and suffering, then finding a way out is absolutely necessary.

But no amount of personal work is going to change “sometimes” to “all the time.” The healthiest, happiest, sanest person in the world doesn’t necessarily live in the present moment, because the present moment is timeless. No matter how expensive our Rolex is, it doesn’t tell the timeless. To be in the present moment all the time requires a shift in identity, which can be specified as follows:

  • “I am me, a separate person” changes to “I am,” without reference to a separate person.
  • “I am here in this location” changes to “I am unbounded and have no location.”
  • “I am young (or old or middle-aged)” changes to “I have no sense of time passing.”
  • “I want” changes to “I am without desires, fulfilled in myself.”

If there was a mechanism like a car’s gear shift to handle these changes, we would be machines ourselves. But in reality, the “I” that wants to live in the present is a mysterious creation of the mind, which itself is a mysterious creation of God-knows-what (insert any theory you want here, religious or secular), and the God-knows-what transcends everyday life. The normal approaches we take to explain “I” unfortunately were constructed by “I,” and therefore there’s a true Catch-22. If “I” investigates itself with the intention of going beyond “I,” the result is simply to reinforce “I,” making sure it sticks around. Giving your ego the project of going beyond the ego won’t succeed, because all you’ve done is add another project to a self that undertakes a hundred other projects (work, family, relationships sex, hobbies, vacations, gossip, and keeping up with the news are only the beginning).

In my forthcoming book, Total Meditation, I offer a way to escape this Catch-22. It begins with the idea that the whole bodymind is naturally set up to live in the present. When it is subjected to stress, the body adapts temporarily until the stress subsides, and then it returns to a dynamic state of balance known as homeostasis. The mind does the same thing. Between every thought or feeling, the mind returns to readiness for the next thought or feeling. This state of readiness is just as balanced as homeostasis. But we fail to notice it because we are entirely focused on mental activity rather than mental silence.

Yet silence is only a superficial clue. In a stressful world peace and quiet acquire a special value. But in reality, the state of readiness is the source of everything we value in our lives. Love, bliss, compassion, creativity, and insight all have the same origin in pure, unbounded awareness. The whole bodymind has the same source. Knowing this, you can consciously return to the readiness state the minute you notice that you aren’t in it.

This openness to let your mind regain its balance is the key to total meditation. Unlike occasional meditation, which requires a set time every day that needs to be set aside, total meditation keeps up with our life from moment to moment. You always keep your eye on the prize, which is to live from your source. There’s no struggle or effort involved. You simply allow your mind to obey its own nature.

There’s much to say about this topic, but when it comes to living in the present moment, total meditation changes “sometimes” to “all the time.” The beauty of such an approach is that you experience change with the support of existence itself. To be here now looks like some kind of deep spiritual challenge. In reality it is just the opposite. Living in the present moment involves a state of awareness that the mind gravitates toward if you leave it alone and let the nature of the mind be what it is. In fact, this is the secret behind all spiritual attainments. The less you try, the closer you get. One could hardly wish for a more propitious setup.

 

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 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 89 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. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.”

The Spread of “Stranger Than We Can Think”

By Deepak Chopra,TM MD and Menas C. Kafatos, PhD

As we go about everyday life, we are embedded in a mystery no one has ever solved. The mystery was voiced by one of the most brilliant quantum pioneers, Werner Heisenberg: “Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.” (There are variants of the quote that use “reality” for “universe,” and the remark has also been attributed to other famous scientists, but the gist is always the same.)

If we take this remark seriously, it turns out to be truer today than it was in 1900 when the quantum revolution began and the revolutionary new theory of quantum mechanics was put together. How can reality be stranger than we could possibly think? Look at the framework of your life. You pick up your morning coffee, and instantly you are acting in space and time. Your perception of the cup in your hand depends upon the five senses as communicated through the brain. You can think about anything you fancy as you sip your coffee.

These might not seem so mysterious, but there is one mystery after another nested inside everyday experience. Science can reach no consensus on the following:

  • Where did time come from?
  • Why do properties of physical objects have their origin in invisible waves of probability of observation?
  • Where does a thought come from?
  • How did matter transform into mind?
  • Is consciousness solely a human trait or is it everywhere in the universe?

The pioneers of quantum physics weren’t the first to ask such questions, but quantum physics got to the nub of how the physical universe is constructed. Everything in existence emerges from ripples in the quantum field, and underlying these ripples is an invisible or virtual domain that goes beyond spacetime, matter, and energy. In the virtual domain, the universe and everything in it is a field of infinite possibilities, and yet the virtual domain cannot be observed directly. As a result, contemporary physics can take us to the horizon of reality, the womb of creation, but it cannot cross the boundary between us and our source of existence.

Almost all the recent models that have gained popularity, including superstrings, the multiverse, and dark matter and energy, exist in so-called mathematical space, or Hilbert space, in recognition that they are not going to yield direct empirical evidence that can be perceived with our senses. Astrophysics had already gotten used to the fact that just 4% of the created universe is accounted for by the matter and energy visible to the eye or to telescopes. With dark matter and energy added in, most of what we see is not really what the universe consists of.

Leaving the technicalities aside, it has become far more difficult to foresee that the human mind can fully comprehend the nature of reality when so many crucial aspects are beyond the setup that our brains can grasp. The thinking mind needs the brain in order to operate, and the brain is a creation in spacetime consisting of matter and energy, that are in spacetime. We wear mind-made manacles. When this fact dawned on the late Stephen Hawking, he ruefully conceded that scientific models might no longer describe reality in any reliable or complete way.

When we discussed these issues in our book, You Are the Universe, the title reflected another approach entirely. Instead of founding the universe on physical things, however small, or even ripples in the quantum field, which are knowable only through advanced mathematics, reality can be grounded in experience. Everything we call real is an experience in consciousness, including the experience of doing science. Mathematics is a very refined, complex language, but there is no language, simple or complex, without consciousness.

The vast majority of scientists will continue to engage in experimentation and theoretical modeling without this venture into “metaphysics,” which is a no-no word in science (a famous put down when things get to speculative is “Shut up and calculate”). But it was quantum physics that brought the mystery of reality into the laboratory in modern terms, even though Plato and Aristotle also wondered about what is real.

A younger generation has proved more open-minded, and a growing cadre of cosmologists now hold to the notion of panpsychism, which holds that mind is built into reality from the start. This is a huge turn-around from the view that mind evolved out of matter here on Earth as a unique creation. The fact is that nobody in the physicalist camp could explain how atoms and molecules learned to think—creating mind out of matter was dead on arrival, even though the vast majority of scientists still hold on to this view as an assumption or superstition.

Ironically, to say that reality is stranger than we can think isn’t confined to the queer behavior of atoms and subatomic particles. You cannot think about consciousness, either, any more than the eye can see itself or the brain know that it exists (without cutting through the skull to see the brain from the outside). A fish cannot know that water is wet unless it jumps out of the sea and splashes back down again. We cannot think about consciousness without a place to stand outside consciousness, and such a place doesn’t exist in the entire cosmos.

The source of space isn’t inside space; the source of time isn’t in time. Likewise, the source of mind isn’t inside the mind. The ceaseless stream of sensations, images, feelings, and thoughts that run through your mind are the products of consciousness. Consciousness itself has no location. It is infinite, without dimensions in space and time, unborn and undying. Can you really think about such a thing as consciousness? And yet you know without a doubt that you are conscious. This is what allows us to make peace with reality being too strange to think about.

We can simply drop the “strange” part. Reality can be founded on knowing that you exist and that you are aware. Existence is consciousness. If science is dedicated to the simplest, most complete explanation of things, existence = consciousness is the simplest and most complete explanation. There is no need for religious or spiritual beliefs in order to accept this foundation for reality, since it is based on what science has arrived at. By removing our outdated allegiance to “things” existing independently of consciousness, the basis of reality can be seen clearly. In our everyday life we navigate with existence and consciousness at our side, indivisible, secure, inviolate, and unchallengeable. A whole new future may spring from accepting this simple but awe-inspiring fact.

 

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 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 89 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. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.”
Menas C. Kafatos is the Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor of Computational Physics at Chapman University. Author, physicist and philosopher, he works in quantum mechanics, cosmology, the environment and climate change and extensively on philosophical issues of consciousness, connecting science to metaphysical traditions. Member or candidate of foreign national academies, he holds seminars and workshops for individuals, groups and corporations on the universal principles for well-being and human potential. His doctoral thesis advisor was the renowned M.I.T. professor Philip Morrison who studied under J. Robert Oppenheimer. He has authored 334 articles, is author or editor of 20 books, including The Conscious Universe, Looking In, Seeing Out, Living the Living Presence (in Greek and in Korean), Science, Reality and

One Word Is the Answer to Everything

By Deepak Chopra™, MD and Neil D. Theise, MD

The one word that is the answer to everything is “space.” It’s a surprising answer that looks far from obvious, but space joins a long list of candidates as old as the written word. The human mind is fond of putting all its eggs in one basket. If you wanted to answer any question, over the centuries you’d be told to rely on one word. In an age of faith the word was God; today it is science. Other one-word possibilities have had their appeal: reason is big, so is love. “All you need is love” is a Beatles lyric that moves the heart, and at the other end of the spectrum, cosmologists searching for a Theory of Everything to unite the fundamental forces in nature stake their hopes on their favorite word, mathematics.

But in many ways space is the one word that satisfies the clashing claims of love, reason, God, and science. Space allows us to embrace all of them. Here’s how the argument goes. In between every thought, there is a gap, a space that divides mental activity into discrete feelings, sensations, images, and thoughts. Spacing makes separate words intelligible. We inhabit a personal space that we don’t like others to intrude upon. Outer space contains every physical object in creation. Inner space is the domain of the psyche. Between them, the space “out there” and “in here” embraces all of existence.

In this manner, spaces are defined by their boundaries. Our skin is the boundary between “out there” and “in here.” The beginnings and ends of words define the space between them. Indeed, even each letter defines the spaces between it and the letters to either side. Jewish mystics speak of the “other alphabet” of the spaces between the Hebrew letters of the scriptures. The moments of thought, of insight, fills the gaps between them.

What gives space its real potency is something mysterious. The gap between thoughts isn’t empty. It is the womb of the mind? No one knows where a thought comes from, but the place must be empty of thought, at least. An artist’s mind isn’t a collection of paintings but the source of possible paintings. So space is the place where possibilities exist. (Calling the mind a space is very old, going back to the Sanskrit term Chit Akash, where Akash means space and Chit is conscious awareness.)

How can empty space contain the possibility of anything, much less everything? That’s a question the mind cannot answer, because thinking is a process that shoots you out of pure space (pure awareness) into the mind’s bustling activity. This sounds like metaphysics, but there is a tantalizing mystery about the space inside your body, which is much closer to home.

Once microscopes were invented, it could be seen that the body is made up of cells. Looking carefully, one observes that every cell derives from a prior cell. But are our bodies only cells, one vast, solidly packed cluster and nothing else? No. Because while many cells are tightly clustered together, many are not.

There are spaces between some cells (in skin, where they allow your body to absorb moisture), though not between others (the digestive tract lining is tightly bound to keep in-flow and out-flow tightly controlled). There are bigger spaces around capillaries, the tiniest blood vessels, where nutrients are delivered to cells and take away the cells’ waste. These spaces are called interstitial spaces, literally the “in between.”

Holding all this together is fibrous tissue made up of different types of collagens and other large molecules, which are stiff or elastic, allowing things in the body to both stay where they are and move when they need to. New kinds of microscopes now allow us to look into the smallest nooks and crannies of living tissues, not just removed and processed to make slides for examining under a standard microscope. We can now observe that all these spaces are probably interconnected, across tissues, across organs, throughout our bodies.

This continuity might be a newly understood path beyond the blood vessels and lymph system for how cancer spreads from one part of the body to another. It might also be the pathway by which the microbiome, the vast bacterial colony in your digestive tract, communicates with the brain and the liver, or how the lungs and heart communicate with the brain and other organs. There is no other conventional answer that works.

We think of space as the emptiness that separates things, and interstitial spaces look empty on a microscope slide, but they are filled with fluid and molecules. They probably conduct electricity, and some cells live and travel through them. On the cosmic scale, outer space is also typically seen as empty, but it is more alive than anything in the visible universe – the “emptiness” of the vacuum we usually picture is full of energy, the energy out of which physical matter arises.

And our thoughts? The spaces between them are not blank. When one stills the mind and experiences a moment of “samadhi” the absence is rich with pure and fundamental Awareness. If the interstitium of the human body is full and unites all the disparate tissues and organs into a living whole, if it is a vast rich energy field filling the vacuum of the universe that brings material existence into being, it is Pure Awareness, consciousness itself that unites and creates all of it. From the smallest to the most vast, notions of inside and outside disappear. Boundaries disappear. Space is simultaneously both nothing and everything.

When a group of physicists and cosmologists was asked to name the one concept they could all agree upon, the answer they came up with was unboundedness. Nothing in creation is disconnected from everything else. Reality is boundless even though our minds and the five senses create boundaries. The appearance of boundaries underlies our belief in separation. But to a quantum physicist, the physical universe has a deeper level where nothing exists but invisible waves or ripples in the quantum field.

These ripples have no edges or boundaries. They are said to collapse in order to appear in the physical domain as objects we can see, touch, and investigate. But the real womb of the universe is known as a mathematical space (Hilbert space). Mathematics would seem to be the ultimate space, but there’s another step to go. Mathematics is still a construct in the mind, and we can’t claim to find the ultimate space until we go beyond mind-made constructs.

All trails eventually lead to some kind of meta-space. The agreed-upon word for it is consciousness (although many scientists are willing to put their eggs into the basket of materialism, preferring to leave consciousness out of the discussion). Consciousness is so different from outer space that it isn’t obvious why “space” is a useful term for it. In fact, the word “space” is only useful to give a general sense of things, the lay of the land. But no words actually describe consciousness.

Consciousness wouldn’t exist if we weren’t conscious. “I think, therefore I am” doesn’t go far enough. “I am aware, therefore I am” is better. You don’t have to be thinking to be aware. Babies are very aware without any words in their heads. It seems fair to say that consciousness is aware of itself, and nothing else, no complex philosophical explanation or religious doctrine, is needed.

A few other things go along with “I am aware, therefore I am.” You are here in the now. You are alive. With life comes thinking, feeling, and doing. These things are so basic that we rarely talk about them. But the questions we’ve touched on (lumped together in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as Life, the Universe, and Everything) occur in the space known as consciousness. Consciousness doesn’t do anything. Invisibly, secretly, it holds possibilities, an infinite number of them, that will manifest as reality.

Thanks to this space known as consciousness, no matter how many ideas, feelings, artworks, dreams, discoveries, and imaginary fancies human beings come up with, an infinite number will remain. Possibilities, like the universe, are unbounded. The whole reason for finding a one-word answer has always been the same: to explain ourselves to ourselves. We, Deepak and Neil, nominate space as the best choice, the one word that holds out infinite promise.

 

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 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 89 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. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.”
NEIL THEISE, MD is a physician-scientist and professor of pathology at New York University Grossman School of Medicine. A global thought leader in clinical and scientific aspects of liver diseases, he is also considered a pioneer of adult stem cell plasticity. As an anatomist, he is most well-known for the re-definition of the human interstitial spaces that became global news as a “new human organ” in 2017. Delving into complexity theory has led him into consciousness studies with longtime collaborator Menas Kafatos. Together they have written on “fundamental awareness” as the ground of being and implications of idealist views of consciousness for understanding the relationships between contemporary scientific practice and experiential insights from diverse cultures of spirituality. He is a Senior Student of Enkyo O’Hara Roshi of the Village Zendo in NYC, a sometime student of Kabbalah, and has recently been initiated into shamanic practice.

Existence and the Virus: A Healing Solution

By Deepak Chopra™, MD

The COVID crisis is being fought on two fronts, medical and economic, but most people are suffering psychologically. The word “existential” rarely comes up in normal everyday life, but the crisis has created all the symptoms of existential dread: a sense of futility, anxiety about the human condition, and a deep fear of death. This comes as a shocking occurrence, and if there is such a thing as existential healing, now is the time for it.

Questions about existence baffle people, and there seems to be no reason to confront them until the last moment. One of the reasons that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s 1969 book, On Death and Dying, was seized upon by millions is that she drew a map of grief that showed dying patients that the inevitability of death wasn’t terrifying in the end. The five stages of grief outlined by Kübler-Ross—denial, anger, depression, bargaining, and acceptance—coincides with what is seen in hospice care. The prospect of death for most people leads to acceptance.

But there is a sixth stage of grieving that applies right now: meaning. The most fortunate patients go beyond acceptance to see that their lives had purpose, that existence is meaningful, and therefore that death lost its final power, which is fear and dread. This is the healing that I think should be embraced now. The actual deaths caused by COVID-19 are outnumbered by the cases of fear and dread being experienced on a mass scale. One way or another, we have all entered the grieving process.

There are two paths to arrive at the peace that comes when your life is meaningful. The first path is through action and achievement. You set out on a purpose, and you succeed in fulfilling it. Ideally everyone should be able to create meaning through the work they do, the service they offer, the love they share, and the good they achieve. But during lockdown, there is often no outlet for this path. We find ourselves passively victimized by a mindless virus that is achieving far more than its human victims; that is, its purpose in life, which is to find a host and multiply, has been astoundingly successful.

But the second path to a meaningful life hasn’t been touched by the virus, and never can be. This path is one of realization. You go inside and discover that you are sustained by your own being. At your core you find value, no matter what you do in life, and no matter what external threats assail you. This path has been open forever, and its teaching occupies the world’s spiritual traditions both East and West. Nirvana, Moksha, liberation, the Kingdom of Heaven within, the peace that passes understanding: by whatever name, the path is essentially the same.

The problem is that we have erected mental barriers that block this path, which should be the easiest path imaginable. Its message is grasped naturally by children: You are here, and that is enough. There is no need to a pilgrimage to a holy place, years in a spiritual retreat, long immersions in silence, or the proverbial cave in the Himalayas. The only thing to do is to wake up as directly as you can, here and now. So why don’t we? It isn’t as if the teachings from spiritual guides, teachers, seers, sages, avatars, gurus, and saints is lacking. What’s the problem?

Once you ask this question, you are on your way to waking up. Existential dread is actually a mental creation. We listen to the voice of fear in our heads; we let fear become an emotion that we feel powerless to oppose; we are lulled into passivity by the everyday routine of life; we don’t bother to see for ourselves; and we have a lot of desirable goals in mind that make it easy to avoid the inner journey.

If you set all of that baggage aside for one moment of clarity, you will see clearly that existence has never been the problem. In fact, it is the solution. Every moment of epiphany, revelation, divine presence, inner peace, etc. has only one source: existence. You have to be here first before anything, good or bad, can happen. So why not just be here? The thinking mind cannot just be here, because it is filled with a riotous display of thoughts, feelings, and sensations. Yet these must have a source, and the source isn’t a thought, feeling, or sensation.

The source is existence. The spiritual promise, the goodie that every religion holds out, is that there is “higher” existence. But this too is a mental construct. Existence isn’t like a luxury high rise that saves the best apartments for the top floors. Existence is the rock solid, indestructible, eternal, immutable zero point at which everything begins. Simply by existing, human beings are given infinite possibilities in life. That alone is the source of life’s vibrancy, as well as our own joy, live, creativity, discovery, and evolution.

The real promise that we should all explore is this: Being is more meaningful than doing. The ultimate healing, the end of all fear, including the fear of death, is contained in that simple axiom. Being is more meaningful than doing. This is why Buddhism engendered the concept of non-doing. Settle down in yourself, meet yourself in silence, appreciate the silence, and accept the peace that is part of existence. You can’t create peace; you can only discover it.

We test out how life works through our experiences. The good experiences encourage us to give a cheer for being alive; the bad experiences raise doubts, fear, uncertainty, and depression. So healing cannot come from amassing more good experiences until your bank account is bursting with them. Goodies don’t make for a good life. Only life makes for a good life. Shed all your experiences temporarily, in other words sit in silence for a few minutes. You won’t know who you really are or what your life means until you meet yourself inside. What awaits is the merging of self, silence, existence, and being. In this merging lies the answer to fear and dread. More importantly, this is where life finally begins to mean everything we want it to mean.

 

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 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 89 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. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.”