How the Reset Works in U.S. Healthcare

By Deepak Chopra™ MD and Wayne Jonas, MD

The COVID-19 crisis has exposed so many fault lines in the U.S. that a call for a reset has sprung up. Years of reckless attacks on the government’s emergency response to a pandemic, and neglect of our public health infrastructure left us unprepared to handle COVID. Now that two vaccines offer hope, with a third or more on the way, the pandemic might become a disaster viewed in the rearview mirror. If it should fade, let’s not forget the important lessons it has taught us for what changes are needed in healthcare to prevent damage from future epidemics.

We can do much better. The CDC reported earlier this year that 90 percent of those hospitalized from coronavirus had underlying chronic health issues such as hypertension, obesity, diabetes, chronic lung and cardiovascular disease. Many are African-American. Many are old and poor. Their plight existed, and was getting worse, before the pandemic shone a glaring spotlight on the tragedies that are caused, in the final analysis, by the system itself.

Rife with political infighting, soaring costs in hospital care and even everyday outpatient care, U.S. health care is shielded behind its triumphs for the acute manifestations of disease, which are worth praising. We have the best ER care in the world, the best advanced medical research, top medical schools, and the best pharmaceutical companies – all focused on recue medicine once disease is advanced.

But behind this impressive shield there is a very real threat of declining wellness and shortened lifespan in this country. As always, following the money gets you to the centers of power. Those who make money from the system as it is, like big pharma and insurance companies, have no incentive to reduce health care costs or prevent disease. The trail also leads to Congress, which is conflicted by money that flows through lobbying to health-care legislation that further benefits the industry as is. What is good for the public often comes second, if at all.

The weakest fault line in the U.S. system is management of chronic or lifestyle disease like heart disease, hypertension, obesity and type 2 diabetes, to which should be added the epidemic of pain and opioid misuse. You cannot monetize prevention and wellness, which is why the system kicks in only when immediate action is called for, generally at the ER and in the hospital. If things had been any different, the death rates from COVID-19 would be much lower and intensive care units would not be as overwhelmed as they are now.

Let’s not make the same mistake we made with the opioid epidemic. In the 1990s, while some leaders at National Institutes of Health were advocating an increase in research on drug-free treatments for pain, including acupuncture, yoga and mind-body practices, mainstream medicine rejected such concepts and basically embraced the use of opioids as a blanket treatment for pain. The opioid epidemic began as a mindset before the first prescription for OxyContin was written.

Now we are scrambling to adopt what was sensible and safe to begin with. The American College of Physicians offers guidelines encouraging the use of acupuncture, yoga and mind-body practices in lieu of opioid prescriptions for chronic pain management. But our system was not built to deliver or pay for these approaches. Not only is it easier for a doctor to write a prescription, but we must face the grim realization that OxyContin was touted as non-addictive, shamefully suppressing research that showed it was.

The only change that will get us out of this morass is a reset of attitudes, beliefs, and outworn habits. In other words, a change in our consciousness. The U.S. military and Veterans Administration have already embraced a whole person, integrative health approach to care because they have a vested interest in reducing costs and having resilient, healthy military communities. That’s a start.

But a wholesale reset requires that we stop thinking in outmoded, inefficient ways and shift to concepts that will sink into the awareness of the whole country.

  • Prevention, which is risk-based, needs to shift to wellbeing, which is a positive lifelong goal.
  • Whole-person approaches need to replace the targeted treatment of symptoms.
  • People need to take an active role in their self-care and wellbeing with support and expert advice from health professionals.
  • Chronic illness needs to be understood as a process that takes years, even decades to develop. The earliest prevention is also the easiest and most effective way to manage disease.
  • Mainstream medicine must shift to a whole person, integrative health approach that promotes and produces health and lifelong wellbeing

Looking at this list, you can see that the reset is not difficult for anyone at the individual level. You don’t have to wait for government, lobbyists, big pharma, or even your local hospital to lead the way. Nothing changes until you are aware of it. Making yourself aware of healthy choices is so basic that millions of people already have taken. We need a medical system that supports this.

 


Wayne Jonas, MD, Executive Director of Samueli Integrative Health Programs, is a board-certified, practicing family physician, an expert in integrative health and health care delivery, a widely published scientific investigator and author of the book How Healing Works. Additionally, Dr. Jonas is a retired Lieutenant Colonel in the Medical Corps of the United States Army. Dr. Jonas was the Director of the Office of Alternative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health from 1995-1999, and prior to that served as the Director of the Medical Research Fellowship at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Family Physicians and clinical Professor of Family Medicine at Georgetown University and the Uniformed Services University. www.DrWayneJonas.com
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 latest book, Total Meditation (Harmony Books) helps us to achieve new dimensions of stress-free living and a joyful life. For the last thirty years, Chopra has been at the forefront of the meditation revolution and his next book, TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.” www.deepakchopra.com

The Matrix Is Real, and It Is Here

By Deepak Chopra, ™ MD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 


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

How Wholeness Works – The Vanishing “I”

By Deepak Chopra, ™ MD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 


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

A One-Minute Lesson in Higher Consciousness

By Deepak Chopra,™ MD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 


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

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.