How to Solve Life’s Problems—A Fresh Idea

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Einstein wasn’t the first person to state one of the basic facts of life when he said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.” But most people attempt, time and again, to think at the level of the problem rather than finding the level of the solution. They continue to do what wasn’t working in the first place. They repeat the same actions expecting that this will lead to different results, when it almost never does.

In a new book, Metahuman, I confront this dilemma head on, starting with the notion that repeating the same futile action is endemic to our way of life. The vast majority of people are trapped inside routine, habits, old conditioning, secondhand beliefs, and the like. They repeat the past without being able to free themselves of the most painful memories. They are afraid of new, unknown things even though every creative idea or solution to a problem comes out of the new and unknown.

The whole complex of old thinking and habits burdens each of us in different ways, from stale relationships and boring jobs to ingrained prejudice and xenophobic nationalism. The rhythm of “same old, same old” beats incessantly, and yet somehow solutions are found, creativity flourishes, new ideas emerge, and “Aha!” moments occur unexpectedly.

Big money in Silicon Valley has been spent by corporations like Google, whose life blood is creativity and innovation, to unlock the secret of creative people and how they think. In their 2017 book Stealing Fire authors Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal describe various attempts to turn creativity into a skill set, all of which essentially failed. It turned out that creativity is a state of consciousness, not a skill.

So the real question is how to arrive at this state of consciousness. It turns out that the level of the solution isn’t different for every problem. Certainly a physicist searching for a new subatomic particle thinks very differently from a mother trying to get her three-year-old to go to bed on time. Problems are specific, and yet oddly enough, solutions spring from the same source in consciousness. If we let this realization sink in, the repetition of “same old, same old” would cease, along with the mystery of how to live in the present moment.

In Metahuman I focus on two breakthrough ideas. The first is that consciousness is the fundamental “stuff” of creation, the second is that existence can take care of itself. These ideas can’t be unpacked here in a short space, but essentially they open the door to finding the level of the solution. If consciousness is the source of everything, it holds all solutions, and if existence can take care of itself, these solutions are always available. All you need to do is get out of the way and allow the natural process of creativity to bubble up from its source.

The restless, active mind is the level of the problem almost all the time—we aren’t speaking of natural disasters or the incursion of other people. The level of the solution lies deeper. “Deeper” implies levels of mind, which isn’t really accurate, but to simplify matters, it is helpful to use a word that implies getting away from superficial mental activity, the busy drone of thinking and reacting. “Closer to the source” makes the point more clearly, perhaps.

We experience new ideas all the time, yet the process is a mystery. We have no idea where we go to get our next thought, and most of the time it comes of its own accord. But when Shakespeare, Newton, or Mozart went inside, they accessed a level of creative thinking that was extraordinary. This level is silent, rich with possibilities, dynamically involved with life’s challenges, intuitive, and insightful. By contrast, most of us go inward and find much less of these qualities—never none, because the mysterious agency that produces thoughts, feelings, and sensations is at work in everyone.

The level of the solution isn’t hard to reach. Everything depends on what you find when you get there. Words meet their match when discussing this issue. Even to say that we go “inward” is a misnomer, because consciousness pervades the bodymind. It isn’t inside your head or inside a cell. Mind has no dimensions the way a dining room or an auditorium does. Because words fall short, only the experience of becoming more creative, insightful, and intuitive really counts.

Can we trigger the experience voluntarily? To some extent yes. Removing stress gives creative thinking a chance to emerge clearly. Being relaxed and open is necessary. Training in a particular field provides a grounding of knowledge and skill. But you can attend to all of these preparations and not make much progress when it comes to problem-solving, because you haven’t changed your state of consciousness. That is accomplished not by thinking about it but by actually going beyond your current state of consciousness.

I took the Greek word “meta,” which means “beyond,” to indicate what is necessary. Metahuman is a state of consciousness that goes beyond what we are normally used to. It doesn’t mean becoming freakish or some other comic-book connotation. The simplest description is waking up—you shift from an unconscious life to a fully conscious, alert, present life. Those are the characteristics of a shift in your state of consciousness. We have glimpses of feeling creative, insightful, intuitive, alert, and open to new experiences. The project of waking up involves taking these glimpses and making them a continuous experience. There is no better way to live. You get real about yourself, other people, and the world at the same time that solutions in all these areas emerge spontaneously, as nature intends them to.

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 

The Mystery of Reality Is the Mystery of You

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Solving the mystery of reality is left to experts, which is nothing new. The explanations of the cosmos is assigned to physicists today as it was assigned to theologians in an age of faith. In some ways modern people are even less interested in the topic. Your soul isn’t likely to be in jeopardy if you don’t accept the Big Bang.

In a new book titled Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, I hope to change this indifferent attitude by showing that the mystery of reality is actually personal. You are the same mystery as the cosmos. My argument isn’t religious or scientific, however. It is based on consciousness, and it begins with a common experience: eating a meal.

See yourself sitting down to breakfast with a plate of eggs and toast in front of you (you can actually do this exercise with your next breakfast). See if you can look at the food simply as shapes and colors; this isn’t hard to do. As you take your first bite, let the taste and smell register without interpreting them as food. This is a bit harder, but imagine that you come from a society that has no eggs or toast, and someone has told you to put these foreign substances in your mouth. At the same time, focus on the sound of chewing and the texture of these substances on your tongue.

The point here is to realize something simple but quite basic. When you were an infant, you had no mental constructs called “food, eggs, toast, sight, taste, texture, and smell.” You experienced eggs and toast directly. The experience preceded the mental constructs. Quickly you learned these concepts, and of course they are very useful. Very young infants in a highchair will splash around their food, throw it on the floor, and treat it generally as a plaything. None of this is acceptable, or even makes sense in the everyday world (except for food fights at school, where food becomes weaponized, itself a mental construct).

Without the mental constructs surrounding breakfast, what is actually present are you and the reality of your experience. There is nothing more fundamental, and the two are inseparable. You cannot have knowledge of breakfast without experiencing it; therefore, breakfast depends on your direct experience.

This simple example has far-reaching consequences. Look out the window as the outside world. If it is daytime imagine seeing the stars at night. Nothing you see has any reality without you being meshed into the experience of it. A skeptic with strong convictions about physical reality will scoff at this claim. “Of course,” he will argue, the food, clouds, stars, and galaxies pre-exist our experience of them. No human was around for the Big Bang.

Strangely enough, some physicists would disagree. Without going into the details offered in my book, I will cut to the chase and say that physics has found it impossible to account for reality, either on the vast scale of outer space or the minuscule scale of atoms and subatomic particles, without an observer. This has given rise, however grudgingly, to the concession that consciousness is probably innate in creation. Without consciousness there can be nothing real. Or if something is real without consciousness, the human mind cannot conceive of it.

Who or what is the cosmic observer needed to make everything real? It doesn’t necessarily have to be a human observer. One possibility is God or the gods, stepping in as the creator and therefore the consciousness that shapes creation. In a secular world the more plausible observer is no one but just consciousness itself. This explanation has a major advantage you might not suspect immediately—it levels the playing field between mind and matter.

Modern science has caught up with centuries of philosophers attempting to solve the mystery of where the mind comes form. Science cannot locate the point in the chain of physical things, starting with subatomic particles, atoms, and molecules, where matter started to think and become conscious. Therefore, it is impossible to say how the ordinary atoms in our brains manage to produce thoughts. It isn’t as if adding more and more oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen suddenly causes them to think. As one wit put it, this would be like adding more cards to the deck and finding that they suddenly know how to play poker.

All mysteries of the most basic kind lead back to consciousness. Where does life come from? How did DNA learn to divide? Is Homo sapiens unique in the cosmos? What lies outside spacetime? Naturally there is concerted resistance to the answer that consciousness is the creator, but more than that, consciousness becomes matter, energy, space, and time. In Metahuman I detail why consciousness is the best answer to every mystery.

As for the mystery of you, all of us identify with mental concepts. We have learned to manipulate them, and in the process we have become the victim of our own labels, beliefs, memories, conditioning, prejudices, and judgments. These are particularly harmful when directed at the question “Who am I?” It is freeing to discover that you are none of these things. You are pure consciousness in action. As you eat your breakfast, no matter what is on your plate, you the experiencer remain as consciousness, while sights, sounds, textures, tastes, and smells move through you.

This sense of self, sometimes called “I am,” stands at the junction point between you and reality. At this junction point there are infinite possibilities. This should be the starting point of human existence. Instead, we learn something different for early childhood, that possibilities are limited, the universe is random, and humans are mere specks in a black void. Only by reversing this misconception can we resume our role as creators of our own reality. It takes a whole book to unfold how liberating it is to change your worldview this radically, but I hope this taste will motivate you to consider how profound the mystery of you actually is.

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 

How to Change Human Nature

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Everyone is good at avoiding the elephant in the room, which refers to something everyone is aware of but cannot bring themselves to discuss. In some ways the ultimate elephant in the room is human nature. We all exhibit human nature, but we rarely discuss it for a simple reason: no one knows what to do with it.

Lions suffer no inner conflict when they prey upon the weak, but we do, or should. Mating season doesn’t send dolphins into an emotional tailspin, but human sexuality is fraught with psychological implications, and for some people these are unresolved for a lifetime. The essential problem, however, is that human nature is torn between opposites. We see ourselves as good and bad together, rational and irrational, peaceful and violent.

The divided self is a central topic in a new book I’ve written titled Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential. In it I counter the general helplessness that people feel about human nature. It’s a helplessness born of being human, quite literally. Just to exist as a human being involves an inheritance of opposites. As children we learn to curb the dark side of these opposites, but psychology hasn’t gotten much beyond Freud’s sad conclusion that civilization barely keeps a lid on our innate tendency to violence, sexual jealousy, hatred of others, and similar inherited woes.
If human nature has been in conflict since recorded history began, perhaps it should remain the elephant in the room. This seems to be a kind of silent consensus. People feel free to discuss almost anything except the presence of the divided self. Countries pass military budgets, cities support police forces, legislatures pass laws, all of which try to curb the worst in human nature, and yet the people passing the laws and paying for armies and police forces are afflicted with the same impulses they attempt to curb.

Despite the tendency to take these things for granted, human nature is not like the nature of a lion, dolphin, or any other creature—it isn’t really fixed or innate. We go beyond our nature all the time, which is why I chose the Greek word “meta,” which means beyond, in the book’s title. There is a well-known dictum that you cannot fix a problem at the level of the problem. This would seem to stymie any solution to the problem of human nature, because most people assume they are stuck with being human and all the defects this entails.

Rationality, science, art, education, and lawmaking constitute vast areas where we do not simply accept our divided self but build constructs that shape reality in an orderly, predictable, safe, and even beautiful way. The streets of Renaissance Italy were rife with gangs and family feuds (think of Romeo and Juliet) that gave rise to daily violence and danger, and yet Leonardo and Raphael flourished at the same time.

Going beyond has its limits, however. One could say that science and art and laws compensate for our inner conflicts without actually solving them. This seems obvious, in fact. Caravaggio, a great Italian painter, was on the run for murder and eventually died by violence in some obscure way no one has gotten to the bottom of. Corruption in politics, as well as the #MeToo movement, are indicators that the worst in human nature lurks in places of the highest positions and power.

In Metahuman I argue that going beyond hasn’t really been tested to the limit. There is a more powerful form of going beyond than art, science, laws, and even rationality. It involves going beyond human nature itself and undoing all the mental constructs that enfold us. The bald fact is that human nature is a self-created construct. The lower brain remains with us on our evolutionary journey, implanted with basic impulses like fight-or-flight. But Homo sapiens escaped from evolutionary jail thousands of years ago.

A lion is a lion because it’s a lion—there is no choice in the matter. Humans are self-created because we are self-aware. Thus we counter survival of the fittest by taking care of our weak, poor, and disabled. We educate ourselves to transcend instinct in favor of expanded awareness. In fact, expanded awareness is our whole purpose. Science and technology cannot exist unless you are aware that there is a challenge or problem to solve. Then you look inside for ideas that lead to a solution.

What this means is that awareness solves the conflicts inherit in human nature. Nothing can be changed if you aren’t aware of it. I am not addressing how difficult our problems are. My only aim is to point to the only true level of the solution that isn’t mired at the level of the problem. We have constructed imperfect societies, imposed religious beliefs that are shot through with mythology, and funded armies to project our need to be violent when called upon.

Yet the things we most value are not mental constructs. They include love, compassion, creativity, generosity, joy, curiosity, and the potential to grow. Leonardo had the mind and skill to paint the Mona Lisa, but he didn’t invent creativity. Einstein had brilliant scientific ideas, but he didn’t invent curiosity. The foundation for what we most value lies at the source of the mind, which is consciousness itself. Human nature was invented at a distance from the source. We can be sure of this because consciousness per se is not divided; it is whole.

Wholeness is uncreated. We exist and we are conscious. That is a statement of wholeness. Metahuman is based on the claim that existence and consciousness are the same. To be fully conscious, you only need to be here now. Everything else is at the level of the problem.

“Be here now” is a good catchphrase, devised by the spiritual teacher Ram Dass, who is still alive. Beyond the catchphrase lies the hidden reality that transcends all of our mental constructs. There is no apparent limit to human potential. We have infinite thoughts to think and infinite ways to express those thoughts. Yet the most brilliant thoughts are still secondary to consciousness itself. The fact is that humans live from the level of thought rather than the level of awareness. This is like knowing how to use a computer while suffering from amnesia about where computers come from.

I’ve only given a bare outline of what can be accomplished by going beyond. The essential thing is to go beyond human nature in order to find the source where human nature was invented. Only from there can we change human nature. Our other choice is to keep living with human nature and shrug off its defects as if they are inevitable. Which course seems better to you?

 

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 

Do We Really Have Infinite Potential?

By Deepak Chopra, MD

The human potential movement has existed for several decades, and in many ways is an alternative name for self-improvement. The urge to improve oneself exists naturally in everyone, unless outside forces like poverty damp it down. But the human potential movement is far more ambitious. It aims to open up a vast area of unexplored potential.

I argue in a new book titled Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential that the true foundation of human potential is infinite. At first that seems like a drastic overreach. Everyone experiences personal limitations that stop far, far short of the infinite. But let me make the case by first turning the whole premise of self-improvement on its head.

The typical way that human potential is approached starts with the limited individual and seeks to lessen these limitations. There’s a school of thought that believes in achieving a 10% increase in happiness, which is seen as a major step. The notion is that happiness is so difficult to understand that any improvement would have to be small. In an area like IQ, the goal is even smaller, because intelligence is accepted among experts to be fixed, budging very little from childhood. A third example is creativity, which would seem to allow for enormous improvement, but finding out what makes creative people creative has proved to be a frustrating and baffling business.

The problem in all these areas, I believe, isn’t human limitation but the wrong starting point. You can’t get to infinite potential by starting with finite potential. All of us start from infinity in certain areas, although we might not realize it. Your mind is capable of infinite thoughts, for example. You won’t actually have an infinite number of thoughts in a lifetime—the actual number is unknown but one assumes it is very large –yet the potential for infinite thought is the reservoir you draw on. You are free to think anything you want.

The same holds true for language. A reasonably large vocabulary of 10,000 to 20,000 words is sufficient to create more sentences than the number of atoms in the universe. The infinite capacity of language parallels the capacity of thought, since thoughts are in words. Another kind of infinity exists with creativity. The potential number of paintings, photographs, and pieces of music that can possibly exist is unlimited.

Since we are already comfortable with the infinite in so many areas, why do we adopt a self-image that is severely limited? The two culprits are ego and the stories the ego builds around itself. What people don’t realize is that their egos have agendas. This agenda consists of seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, following a constant stream of desires that want fulfillment, finding safety and security, and defending itself from threat.

To turn this agenda into reality is a skill we were all taught as children. A child is full of doubt and curiosity; everything in life demands to be tested. In the process of having desires, feeling insecure, wanting predictability, and pleasing our parents, we wobble towards maturity on a path that is different for everyone and yet the same. The ego accumulates experiences that must further its agenda in order to be acceptable. Too much pain, difficulty, vulnerability, embarrassment, defeat, and rejection by others constitute a major threat to the ego agenda.

Since life is unpredictable, it can bring any of those undesirable experience at any time. To defend against this possibility, the ego builds up a story about what a person’s life is all about, and in this story things are not unpredictable—far from it. Most people think, say, and do what they said, thought, and did yesterday. In this way we feel a measure of security, but it comes at the cost of losing our infinite potential. Nothing limits the unlimited reservoir of thoughts, words, and creativity except our self-imposed boundaries.

If the ego’s agenda actually worked, life might be fulfilling enough. However, there is no escaping the fact that the future is unknown, filled with awful possibilities the ego cannot defend against.

Deep down we all know this, but instead of dropping the ego agenda, we become more insecure and stick to it more rigidly. People cling desperately to money, possessions, status, power, and old habits with a fierceness that is in direct proportion to their deep insecurity. Nothing is ever enough to defend you against whatever life might bring. The human potential movement faces an uphill battle because of the inner struggle few of us ever resolves. We want to expand, improve, and better ourselves while at the same time we want to desperately cling to our story, which is founded on anxiety and insecurity.

In Metahuman I argue that beginning from infinite potential is the only way to escape the grip of one’s ego agenda. This doesn’t entail exceptional courage in the face of the unknown. It only involves going beyond your current level of awareness. Einstein observed, as have many others, that problems are not solved at the level of the problem. The ego and its agenda are a constant problem, so the solution is to go beyond the level of struggle where the ego rules.

“Meta” is the Greek word for beyond, and it points toward metahuman, a state of awareness that is fully conscious. The process of becoming metahuman is like waking up. You begin to investigate your personal story and to free yourself from it. The essential thing is to realize that you have edited, censored, reduced, and distorted reality. What you call real is a mind-made dream, spell, or illusion.

Life cannot be whole unless you are whole, a word most people find more comfortable than infinite. But they amount to the same thing. At the source of human awareness there is pure consciousness, the state of awareness that exists simply because it exists. Pure consciousness isn’t flat or empty, however. It is the source of the things we most value out of life: love, compassion, intelligence, creativity, and personal evolution. The closer you live from the source, the greater your share of these valuable things.

This possibility cannot come true until you test it personally. Instead of following an ego agenda, you must shift into a waking-up agenda. This reversal sounds drastic, but in reality it comes naturally once you start. Anything the mind has made the mind can unmake. The potential for metahuman is embedded in the human. We only have to notice and take advantage of the openings that life brings every day. Infinity has always been the right starting point for being truly human, and it beckons us again, as it has forever.

 

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His anticipated book, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, (October 1, 2019) unlocks the secrets to moving beyond our present limitations to access a field of infinite possibilities.
Chopra hosts a new podcast Infinite Potential and Daily Breath available on iTunes or Spotify  www.deepakchopra.com 

The Balanced Mind: A Better Model

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Now that meditation has caught on widely, it’s time to understand why it works. The physical findings measured by neuroscience gives intriguing hints about changes in brain wave activity, but that’s an effect, not a cause. The same holds true for physiological changes outside the brain, such as lowered heart rate and blood pressure. The how and why of meditation must be sought “in here,” in the meditator’s subjective experience.

This isn’t a mysterious route to take. Pain studies are based on how much pain a subject feels; there is no objective way to measure this. In the case of meditation, I believe the correct model is that the mind in meditation is rebalancing itself. Medical studies have known for a long time that the body tends toward a state of dynamic balance known as homeostasis. If you push your body out of balance by shoveling snow off the driveway or running a marathon, as soon as you stop that activity, heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen use in the muscles, and even digestion and the immune system return to homeostatic balance.

Something similar is supported by psychological studies into emotion—everyone seems to have a set point for a level of mood to which they return after an emotional event, whether the event is happy or sad. But the notion that the mind rebalances itself is new. We all pay attention chiefly to the activity whirling around in our heads, and this activity takes only brief pauses here and there, awaiting the time when we fall asleep, where conscious activity ceases (except in dreams). So it has never seemed that the mind is rebalancing itself. Indeed, what would that even feel like?

I believe that meditation wouldn’t work unless the mind already had a rebalancing mechanism. It’s not as if meditation is magical. It only deepens what the mind naturally does already, the way that relaxation techniques deepen the relaxed state that the body returns to in homeostasis.

If we look closely into our own experience, it isn’t hard to identify the states of mind that rebalance it. The names we give to different kinds of meditation techniques shows the way.

Mindfulness

Self-Inquiry

Reflection

Contemplation

Concentration

Prayer

Quiet mind

Controlled breathing

Bliss

I believe that these techniques are simply ways of deepening a process that the mind already uses to rebalance itself.

Mindfulness is how your mind rebalances distraction. You are brought back into the present moment. This is naturally where every cell in your body lives. It is also where the mind should live.

Self-Inquiry is how your mind rebalances habits. By asking yourself, “Why am I doing this?” you bring conscious choice into a situation where you have been ruled by habits, routines, obsessive behavior, knee-jerk reactions, and outworn beliefs.

Reflection is how your mind rebalances thoughtlessness. You regard your behavior, see what is self-defeating or heedless about it, and realize what is actually going on. The mind is naturally thoughtful when it reflects upon itself.

Contemplation is how your mind rebalances confusion. When faced with multiple choices, each with its points pro and con, you sort everything out by contemplating the situation until you have clarity. The mind naturally prefers clarity over confusion.

Concentration how your mind rebalances pointlessness. It is pointless to do a careless job, having careless opinions, and relate to other people in a lazy, careless way. It creates many kinds of trouble when you feel that life is pointless. By concentrating itself, the mind gets absorbed in something deeply enough that it has a point. This satisfied the mind’s natural urge to find life meaningful.

Prayer how your mind rebalances helplessness. By contacting a higher power, you no longer feel isolated, alone, small, and lost. Those are the qualities of helplessness, and for centuries humans have summoned God or the gods to bring a higher power into their lives. The mind naturally wants to be rid of feeling powerless.

Quiet mind how your mind rebalances restlessness. The mind is constantly processing daily life and its challenges, but when mental activity becomes restless, there is a risk of exhaustion, anxiety, and mental agitation. The mind naturally wants to be quiet when no activity is necessary. In peace and quiet lies the simple contentment of existence, but also the potential for confronting the next situation that demands a response.

Controlled breathing is how your mind rebalances stress. Stress is the term we’ve devised for an imbalanced state of mind and body under pressure. Breathing becomes rapid and irregular. Behind the scenes many other signs of imbalance are occurring, but breathing is connected to the whole issue of responding to pressure. By taking a few deep breaths, sighing deeply, or falling asleep (a natural state of regular, relaxed breathing), a choice has been made to return to balance.

Bliss is how your mind rebalances suffering. The mind naturally prefers well-being to suffering, no matter how much we rationalize that certain forms of suffering are good for us. Bliss, joy, or ecstasy is a state of perfect happiness. It seems to arrive unpredictably, but we all have experienced it, and the mind wants to be there as much as possible. Bliss is a natural state; suffering is an unnatural distortion, a kind of persistent bad vibration that destroys the mind’s good vibrations.

This new model contrasts with age-old viewpoints about the mind being like a monkey, a metaphor often cited from Indian traditions, or like the struggle between virtue and sin or angels and demons, which is more Christian. We need to go beyond metaphors now. Clearly the human mind is the source of our greatest achievements. This alone is enough to support the notion that the mind isn’t a battlefield of happiness versus suffering. The mind is a self-balancing process in constant dynamic motion that is subject to imbalances that create conflict, confusion, and suffering.

The advantage of this model is that it allows meditation to become more central as a healing mode. By accentuating the mind’s rebalancing ability and deepening it, by bringing the mind’s natural tendencies under our conscious control, meditation in all its forms is the most natural way to heal our minds of everyday difficulties, without any side effects. From this modest basis all the promises of higher consciousness can be explored, because they are only a further deepening of the same processes.

 

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His anticipated book, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, (October 1, 2019) unlocks the secrets to moving beyond our present limitations to access a field of infinite possibilities.
Chopra hosts a new podcast Infinite Potential and Daily Breath available on iTunes or Spotify  www.deepakchopra.com