Making the Season of Peace Really Matter

By Deepak Chopra, MD

A world ceaselessly in a state of unrest seems to mock this time of year as a season of peace. Most people are simply grateful that unrest hasn’t touched their lives, and hope fades for the victims of war and strife who will probably never enjoy peace except during brief truces. The link between holidays and holy days may be fragile in these times, but you can be a unit of peace consciousness starting now.

This happens at the level of intention and attention.

First, intention. Holidays are about gatherings, first of family but also of events that embrace community and nation. It’s therefore easy to feel, on the negative side, that you have little or no control over what’s happening around you. Swept up in holiday rituals that are simply a given, surrounded by squabbling family members and old tensions, you can easily be overwhelmed.

The way out is by centering yourself and being clear, first on the inside, what you intend your holiday season to be. A helpful exercise is to sit quietly with eyes closed and say to yourself, I want joy. I want peace. I want grace and love. As you say each phrase, pause and feel joy, peace, love, and grace as the silence of your Being. Joy, peace, love and grace are your essential nature. It doesn’t matter how you settle into this feeling/knowing. Putting your attention on your heart is often helpful, or seeing a soft light in that region.

No one can intend these things except you, and when you feel them inside, you don’t depend on others quite as much. Try repeating this exercise every day during the holiday season. You can go a step further, too. Instead of seeing this as a defense against holiday stresses, why not commit yourself to making the holidays a time for your own evolution? In other words, by asking for joy, peace, love, and grace, your intention is to arrive at the new year renewed in spirit.
Secondly, attention. Once you have committed yourself to evolving during the holidays, put your attention on this. What most people do at this time of year is brace themselves for the negative side of the holidays—the family tensions, shopping, scary credit card bills, hectic pace, and for many, a predictable bout of depression. The gap between what people wish for and what actually happens to them is wide. You can put your attention on closing the gap, both for you and for others.

Some suggestions to do this:

  1. Raise your appreciation quotient. When you interact with anyone, don’t automatically mutter “Happy Holidays.” Say of word of appreciation and offer a smile. Make them feel your good will.
  2. Think less about yourself, more about others. Inner growth doesn’t happen at the ego level, and it’s the ego that constantly finds fault, with yourself and others. By turning your attention to others, you can give yourself a vacation from the ego.
  3. Practice empathy. Focus on how others are feeling and extend yourself with sympathy. Empathy establishes an emotional bond and helps counter the isolation and loneliness that people tend to feel during the holidays. But empathy can also extend to noticing how happy someone looks, also. It doesn’t have to be sympathy for negative emotions.
  4. Be easy on yourself. If you aim to make the holidays perfect, failure is around the corner. Most people are weighed down by demands they make on themselves, so consciously look for ways to be easy on yourself. Taking time out every day for a few private moments to relax and meditate is a good practical step.
  5. Keep away from toxicity. When you find yourself in the presence of toxic emotions, tension, stress, and conflict, don’t join in. Do your best to walk away as soon as you can. Toxicity also extends to alcohol. It may be traditional to drink heavily during the holidays, but remain mindful of your consumption. In fact, notice if you aren’t actually more pleasant and friendlier without alcohol.
  6. Set limits, and do it gracefully. When people drink or revive old family issues or find other excuses to drop their inhibitions, things often get said and done that lead to regret. It doesn’t matter if other people stop respecting your boundaries. It is up to you to maintain them, to politely point out when you are uncomfortable. If the other person can’t take a hint, don’t repeat your objection but walk away.
  7. Watch out for reactive responses. A reactive response is a knee-jerk response, and most people indulge in them dozens of times a day. We repeat the same words, feelings, opinions, beliefs, and judgments without pausing to think. If you want to evolve, reactive responses aren’t helpful. They prevent you from living in the now, renewing yourself, being open to new possibilities, seeing something good in other people, and much more. So, if you notice yourself thinking, feeling, or saying something and you know you’re automatically repeating the past, pause, and find a different response.
  8. Look for new responses. Once you stop reacting, a space is open for a new response. Where do you find it? Look around. Open your eyes to something or someone in the room that you haven’t noticed before. Or simply center yourself and be quiet inside for a moment. The point is to step outside constricted awareness. Being “tight” in your awareness supports the reactive mind; being “loose” in your awareness brings openness.
  9. Focus on the spiritual, the uplifting side of things. Even if you find little to inspire you from other people and outside events during the holidays, don’t criticize them, or the world, for that. Inspiration is an inner quality. Turn to the poetry or scriptures that inspire you, and you will find in them something precious: intimate communication from another person’s heart and soul. It doesn’t even matter if you adopt the beliefs or sentiments in the words. The important thing about inspiration is its humanity, the felt presence of someone else’s higher self that sparks and warms your higher self.

 

These nine points give you a personal agenda for the holidays, and with a little creativity, you can personalize them to fit your life. Even though the time may not come soon when holy days take on their true meaning, as times for spiritual communion, but you can still devote yourself to a private spirituality that brings holiness to your inner world.

 

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. He is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego. Chopra is the author of over 89 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His 90th book and national bestseller, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential (Harmony Books), 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.”

Finding Your Way to Gratitude

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Although Thanksgiving Day has become a time for turkey and football, its true purpose lingers, often as a wistful hope that one could be truly thankful. You cannot conjure up thanks if you are focused on the world’s troubles and a constant stream of bad news. So how is true gratitude found?

As writer and teacher Dana Arcuri has said, “The more you are grateful for what you have, the more you can live fully in the present.”. Psychologically, research has shown that practicing gratitude measurably improves your well-being and on the physical side, your heart health.

Gratitude begins when we change our relationship with life from an attitude of rejecting and defending to one of acceptance and appreciation. We all need reminding about a truth expressed by the Greek philosopher Epicurus, “Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.”

When you spontaneously feel grateful for anything, don’t let the moment slip by. Pause, put your attention on the heart region in your chest, and experience the warm emotion suffusing it—this is how gratitude opens up the experience of love and bliss. At the same time you are making a mind-body connection. The sensation of warmth in your heart tells you that the message of gratitude has been sent and received by your cells. You can reinforce this connection by visualizing what you are grateful for; visualization is a powerful way to focus your intention.

Another very good practice is to lie in bed for a few minutes before falling asleep to review your day, bring to mind the things you are grateful for but were too busy to notice. Another quote is relevant, this one from the poet Maya Angelou: “Let gratitude be the pillow upon which you kneel to say your nightly prayer.” In other words, feeling grateful can be a devotional meditation.

Many people feel grateful in a way that doesn’t go very deep, especially if their motivation is material. Being grateful for a great job, big house, and new car keeps everything on the surface. At a deeper emotional level we are grateful for our families and good health. But at the deepest level, gratitude acknowledges that you have the support of nature. This support underlies your whole existence. It comes to you from pure consciousness, expressing itself through your true self.

Your true self is connected to pure consciousness and everything that flows from it. There is also another self, the ego, that manipulates life for its own purposes. The ego constantly chooses between “I want this” and “I don’t want that.” Life proceeds by getting more of what you want and less of what you don’t want. But this process overlooks the values located in the true self: love, compassion, truth, beauty, discovery, creativity, and evolution.

Some of these values do manage to make it to the surface of life, but our birthright is to have much more of them. Gratitude is a way of opening the channel that will bring more, by contacting the true self and speaking from your heart. Buddha taught a gratitude meditation called “gladdening the heart,” instructing the aspirant to consider the wonderful circumstances that led them to seek spiritual awakening and the ability to achieve it. Thanksgiving Day may never match the wisdom of this kind of meditation, but you can start, beginning her and now to bring the power of gratitude into your 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 health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. He is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego. Chopra is the author of over 89 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His 90th book and national bestseller, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential (Harmony Books), 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 Future of Personal and Planetary Well Being : An invitation to Sages and Scientists Symposium, Crystal Bridges Museum, Bentonville Arkansas

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Despite a steady increase in life expectancy, medical science is facing diminishing returns. It has been estimated that every increase in lifespan since 1990 has resulted in only ten months of increased healthy life; the rest is only prolonged suffering and the decline of aging. Globally more people now die of so-called “lifestyle diseases” than from infectious diseases. Doctors cannot make choices about lifestyle; only the patient can. Finally, half of all heart attacks before old age occur in people who live a good lifestyle, managing their weight, eating right, and exercising regularly.

What lies beyond lifestyle? That’s a matter of much speculation. Will human existence be improved in the future through technology, genetic manipulation, nano-robots in the bloodstream serving as cancer hunters? Or will it take a new philosophical conception, one that entices people away from a life of speed, constant activity, and stress?

By all odds it will take both, because innovations in technology can’t succeed if we continue to define well-being in old, outworn ways. Consider the following statements, which almost everyone, including doctors, take as fact:

  • The body is a machine, and like all machines it breaks down.
  • Aging is a pre-determined process, probably controlled by our genes.
  • The body is a mindless lump of matter except for the brain, which has evolved to produce mind or consciousness.]
  • The causes of most diseases are now known. What remains is to find effective drugs to target each malady.
  • You are healthy until something goes wrong, which is signaled by the appearance of symptoms.

In reality none of these statements is correct. The body isn’t a machine; machines cannot heal themselves. The body isn’t mindless; every cell is imbued with vast knowledge that far surpasses anything found in medical textbooks. The brain doesn’t produce the mind; that’s merely an assumption that has never been proved.

The most urgent need facing each of us is how to envision our bodies without the burden of outworn assumptions, which is why, starting in two weeks, an annual symposium known as Sages & Scientists Symposium will bring together the best thinkers with views both humanistic and scientific. This year’s theme is “The Future of Well-Being,” and the public is invited to attend. There is nothing on the planet as open to the free exchange of ideas, from every kind of thinker and researcher, all aiming to find a way forward into a viable future.

In my view a total rethink of the human body is long past due. To begin with, the division between mind and body is totally arbitrary. The body is a super-highway of information traveling to every cell, and thousands of different molecules inside a cell know exactly what their precise function is. The body’s ability to heal, along with the immune system’s encyclopedic knowledge of all the disease organisms our ancestors encountered (and defeated), far exceeds current medicine.

To get real about your body, you need to see it as a bodymind, a wholeness whose capacity for survival is only exceeded by its capacity to evolve. As the British physicist David Deutsch pointed out in a TED talk this past April, human beings have freed ourselves from the laws of nature that govern the physical universe, and this freedom has allowed us to define entirely how our future will look. That’s a startling reinvention of what it means to be human, because everyone assumes that the laws of nature are vastly more powerful than human beings.

In reality the possibilities created in our consciousness are infinite, but we will remain limited, insecure, and fearful until a new vision tells us who we really are. The body is as conscious as any thought, which is why bodymind is the right conception of our wholeness. Consciousness creates, governs, and organizes every process in the bodymind, and the source of this unlimited knowledge is you. There is no higher power or law of nature dictating your future. The limitations we ascribe to illness, aging, and death are largely mind-made, and the worst of these limitations is our belief that we must be limited.

In reality there is no “must” about it. The reason science talks about biology as destiny and evolutionists talk about humans as higher apes rests upon a deeply rooted mistake, that we are physical creations glommed together from bits and pieces of matter. This is the same as saying that a masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci or Picasso is just daubs of oil paint. The entire point of a great painting is the consciousness that goes into it, fashioning beauty and meaning first and foremost.

Likewise, human beings are conscious agents whose existence, first and foremost, is rooted in beauty and meaning also, to which can be added everything else we most value: love, compassion discovery, curiosity, creativity, and evolution. These are aspects of consciousness, and the bodymind is our vehicle for exploring them. The future will be viable only if we have the confidence to see ourselves as expressions of higher consciousness.

I inaugurated Sages & Scientists Symposium so that the best thinkers would feel comfortable in each other’s company. Instead of compartmentalization, which is the norm in the academic world, there is a free and open field in which anything, from artificial intelligence to Vedanta, from virtual reality to epigenetics, is given time and space to be expressed. The concept has borne fruit beyond anything I originally envisioned. Now it can be truly said that well-being has a future and not simply a repeat of the past. The only way to know if human potential is unlimited is to test it through unlimited imagination, discovery, and deep understanding. The sooner every individual grasps this, the more we can live in hope and optimism.

 

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and founder of Chopra Global and co-founder of Jiyo, 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 and Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest book is Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential. Chopra hosts a new podcast Infinite Potential and Daily Breath available on iTunes or Spotify www.deepakchopra.com 

Personal Transformation—What It Really Means

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Most people have mixed feelings about how their lives are going, which seems inevitable. Taking the bitter with the sweet is an old saying dating back to the 13th century, but it expresses a universal experience. In the face of life’s mixed blessings, however, there runs a deep yearning for transformation. It is expressed through visons of heaven where eternal bliss is gained, in romantic literature where a perfect life is attained here on earth, and in utopian visions of every kind, including worldwide myths of a lost Eden or a Golden Age.

Is this yearning for transformation mere wish fulfillment, like dreaming of what you’d do if you won the lottery? If you are totally pragmatic, the answer is yes, and having abandoned such fantasies you can productively direct your energies to becoming better off by inches and degrees. Even then, modest goals aren’t always achievable. We settle for half a loaf, or less, because common sense tells us to.

But I think the issue runs deeper than pragmatism. In my new book Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, I propose that the desire for transformation is not only realistic but totally necessary. Transformation is like the total change of state when two invisible combustible gases, oxygen and hydrogen, combine to form a liquid, water, that puts out fires. The essential nature of the two gases give no hint that they could be transformed so completely. But that is what transformation means, as opposed to gradual stepwise change.

What would it mean to totally transform a human being? Despite the stubborn way that people resist change, clinging to beliefs, fears, biases, and personal tastes for no rational reason, we are transformative beings. This can be evidenced in everyday experience.

  • When you have a thought, mental silence is transformed into a voice in your head.
  • When you see an object, invisible electrical signals in your brain transform into color and shape.
  • The sense of sight works by taking minuscule snapshots that have no motion, but your mind transforms these into the moving world.
  • In the presence of a sudden shock, the balanced state of your body at rest is transformed into the state of fight or flight.
  • The words “I love you,” if spoken by the right person at the right time, creates a total psychological transformation known as falling in love.

None of these experiences is alien, yet we don’t usually label them transformative. Why not? Because the setup for being human is drastically tilted toward conformity, normality, and conventionality. Every child absorbs, as if by osmosis, that life is a struggle between good and bad, light and dark, desire and frustration, success and failure.

This condition, generally known as duality, is what Metahuman tries to overturn. Duality condemns us to a lifetime of either/or choices. We identify with the choices we make, and then we cling to the identity that results. We shake our heads when we encounter people who have made bad choices, turning for example into racists or xenophobes, but at bottom the problem isn’t bad choices and the solution isn’t good choices. Either side of the coin keeps you trapped in duality.

Transformation provides an escape route from what is otherwise an all-embracing worldview. All visions of transformation have in common a desire to be liberated, set free from some kind of personal limitation. In exceptional cases, such as the life of the Buddha or Jesus, the vision of transformation renounces everything duality holds out as the good life. To be in the world but not of it is as radical as seeking to escape the eternal cycle of pleasure and pain.

In Metahuman I don’t argue for radical transformation in that way. Instead of presenting transformation as a far-away goal, I argue that it should be a starting point. The common experiences cited earlier give a clue to what the transformed life is like. It is open to change because change is always with us. It allows rather than resists, because no one can predict where any situation might go.

But the biggest shift occurs in a person’s identity. Instead of identifying with all the choices you’ve made in your life, you identify with the state of awareness you are in. Consciousness becomes your identity. I can illustrate what that means with a simple example. Imagine that you are on a debating team, and the question is “Does God exist?” In this debate the two teams will draw lots to determine who take which side of the question. As a debater you are prepared to argue for total faith in God or total atheism.

Clearly a good debater can do this, and in our legal system, defense lawyers are often asked to mount an argument for indefensible clients. In everyday life we identify with one viewpoint or the other, faith versus atheism, but in reality we are set up to rise above either position, simply because we can instantly change our perspective. This is more basic than any single perspective, yet we live as if the opposite is true. Every “-ism” is just a perspective somebody wants to defend and cling to. Nazism is dire while pacifism is benign, but each concept limits your unconditioned consciousness, depriving you of the power of transformation.

“My way or the highway” has become a noxious trend in today’s divisive world, by which polarization has become the status quo. But at a subtler level we all cling to our point of view, having forgotten that to be human is never a point of view. To be human is to go beyond any fixed belief, conditioning, bias, or fixed assumptions. What would it be like to live as if transformation is your true essence? That’s the real issue we should be discussing, because the future of humanity and of the planet depends on the answer we arrive at.

 

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and founder of Chopra Global and co-founder of Jiyo, 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 and Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest book is Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential. Chopra hosts a new podcast Infinite Potential and Daily Breath available on iTunes or Spotify www.deepakchopra.com 

Are Human Beings the Ultimate Creator?

By Deepak Chopra, MD

It’s rare to find someone with an optimistic view of humanity’s future. The prevailing mood globally is dark, and yet David Deutsch, a far-seeing British physicist, argues that humans are responsible for everything new—we are the ultimate creators in the cosmos.

I was excited to view his April 2019 TED talk headlined “After billions of years of monotony, the universe is waking up” By monotony Deutsch means the mechanistic processes that have been in place ever since stars and galaxies began to form, and by waking up, he means us. We are a unique source of creative novelty in the universe, so far as we know.

To support this very original idea, Deutsch points out that humans have told themselves a story for centuries that is mistaken. We have seen ourselves caught in the middle of struggle between cosmic good and evil, which was expressed in religious terms for a long time but has been updated by science into the struggle between order (the good side of the war) and chaos (the destructive side of the war, and therefore bad).

What we fail to realize, he says, is that human beings are not subject to the laws of nature; we use them in creative ways and therefore have broken the monotonous chain of pre-determined cosmic forces. This became possible thanks to DNA. When life first appeared, it began to change planet Earth.

In itself this was unparalleled in the universe, where tiny things are as a rule dominated by bigger things. When a comet hits the sun, for example, the comet is destroyed while the sun, being much bigger, is unaffected. Earth has been hugely affected by DNA, however. Photosynthesis from one-celled plants provided the necessary oxygen in the atmosphere to sustain higher life forms. The planet has chalk deposits, oil, gas, and coal thanks to dead life forms.

This amounts to the first time that the monotonous universe found a new direction, hence his use of waking up. The epitome of waking up arrived with Homo sapiens. Since that is the theme of my new book, Metahuman, I was particularly fascinated by this part of the argument. If we stop seeing ourselves as passively trapped between good and evil, evolution and entropy, the light and dark sides of our own nature, we can redefine what it means to be human.

What it means—here I totally agree with Deutsch—is unbounded creative potential. In Deutsch’s view we are the only life form that has the ability to acquire new knowledge that can be communicated in language, and from this unique ability we can turn any knowledge into technology. Our whole reality is already mind-created, and there is no reason to believe that the creative process is about to end.

In my book I also speak of human reality as mind-made, but I see that a choice is involved. Besides creative knowledge, we walk around prey to illusions created by the mind. The war between cosmic good and evil serves as only one example. Everyone is trapped in beliefs, prejudices, second-hand opinions, and unproven assumptions. These, in fact, are the source of war, crime, violence, racism, famine, anxiety, and pessimism. There is nothing in the setup of reality to confirm the necessity of any of these limitations.

Everyone knows before going into a war that the outcome will be pointless destruction and suffering, yet we find ourselves unable to turn this realization into lasting peace. Our self-made constructs push us in directions we know are bad for us. The point of Metahuman is that only by going beyond, arriving at a new level of self-awareness, can human beings evolve. I feel that this adds a new element to Deutsch’s model for the future. Where he places his faith on knowledge as the ultimate creative agency. I think the picture must be widened. Knowledge depends on the ability to know, an ability that is traceable to consciousness.

This doesn’t sound like a big distinction, but it is. Deutsch offers a radical rethinking of what it means to be human, yet his basic worldview is physical. He ascribes novelty and creative force to DNA, not to consciousness. But if he is right that evolution has led to humans as the ultimate knowers, where did this knowing arise? Either it was present in the creation to begin with, or you are forced to find the time and place where atoms and molecules bunching together learned how to think. Such a time and place has never remotely been discovered—and it never will be.

Knowing, as a trait of consciousness, must pre-exist. There is nothing to know without a knower, yet humans cannot be unique knowers. It took knowledge to create us. We didn’t create the trait of knowing; it came with life itself, and indeed with the whole project of the created universe. It takes a whole book to explain how existence and consciousness are one. But in his TED talk Deutsch describes just how far knowledge has gotten us, pointing out that our creative unfoldment is hardly about to end. Accepting that is half the battle.

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and founder of Chopra Global and co-founder of Jiyo, 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 and Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest book is Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential. Chopra hosts a new podcast Infinite Potential and Daily Breath available on iTunes or Spotify www.deepakchopra.com