The Best Way to Change Your Life: Getting Unstuck

By Deepak Chopra, MD

There are lots of reasons to consider the human mind is unfathomable, beginning with simple evidence like the thousands of psychology books on the market and the years of training required to become a licensed psychiatrist. But it is possible to create huge changes in how your mind is working, here and now, that do not require in-depth knowledge.

Instead, all that is needed is the habit of watching yourself. Life is about action and reaction. Very complex and tangled influences may be at work—and almost certainly are—but they mostly remain undercover. What we experience is action and reaction, which leads to each person’s unique pattern of behaving.

Looking at your behavior on the scale of months and years, or even days and weeks, is impossible, because everyone has thousands of thoughts that lead to thousands of actions and reactions. But it is very different, and much easier, to simply look at what happens next. If you look at your next reaction to anything—an incident at work, a phone call, your child running in with a scraped knee—the same thing happens next: you do something based on the past.

You possess a backlog, a virtual library, of memories that imprinted how you acted and reacted. Some people are more predictable than others in how they act and react—a frontline soldier confronts very limited options compared with a philosopher. But everyone consults a library of set responses when the next thing happens.

If these set responses work out reasonably well, most people are satisfied. They react and move on. But if you take a moment to observe your next reaction, some disturbing clues emerge about what is actually going on inside you. These observations include the following:

  • Your reactions are knee-jerk and not actually thought through.
  • Being the product of memory, your reaction is repeating the past rather than meeting the present moment.
  • Set responses make you a robot of the past.
  • If you think you are living in the present, you are the victim of an illusion.

These observations describe someone who is stuck. Stuckness doesn’t need a technical definition. Look around, and you will see people repeating themselves all the time, engaging in mindless daily routines, arguing over the same old things in relationship, feeling uncomfortable with change, and suffering pain and frustration because their lives never seem to improve.

None of that sounds desirable, so why do we content ourselves with being stuck? Again observation provides an answer. If you look at your next reaction, there is a push-and-pull between the positive and negative aspects of being stuck.

Positive: Routine makes life predictable and reassuring. Repetition is the path of least resistance. It feels safe to know where you stand. Fixed reactions remove the threat of the unknown.

Negatives: Routine is stifling and boring. Repetition is stultifying. It feels empty to think of yourself as a known quantity, with nothing new to offer. By not welcoming the unknown, all avenues of creativity, discovery, and curiosity are cut off.

If you consider the positives and negatives for a moment, there’s no contest. Everyone would want to get unstuck. Tolerating a routine, repetitive existence leads nowhere. We all know this inside, even if we have to dig deep to admit the truth. Money, skill, and status don’t make a difference, which is why doctors have a high burnout rate.

The real problem isn’t stuckness but not knowing how to get unstuck. The simple step already mentioned—observing your own reactions—is the key. Stuckness represents a surrender to unconscious habits, beliefs, and old conditioning. To undo their hold on you, you must first observe how these influences work. You cannot change what you aren’t aware of.

What should you start noticing? Very simple things, really.

  • Notice when you say something you said before.
  • Notice when you react the same way you reacted in the past.
  • Notice when other people tune you out.
  • Notice how you actually feel, here and now.
  • Notice when you resort to anxiety or anger.

Many times, all you have to do is to observe these repeated reactions and they will start to dissolve and dissipate. You are exchanging an unconscious existence for a conscious one, and living consciously is both the remedy and the goal of getting unstuck. But there is also a simple action you can take. When you notice any of the reactions on the list—in other words, any obvious repetition of old conditioning—stop at once.

By stopping you tell your unconscious mind that you don’t want to operate on autopilot. What happens next? Wait and see. Most of the time, especially at first, the old conditioning will force its way back. Autopilot has had years of reinforcement. It thinks it knows what to do in any situation. Only you have the power to wake up from this fixed notion, because only your conscious mind can turn the autopilot off.

Getting unstuck requires nothing more than what I’ve described. Everyone has conscious moments, many of them in fact. No one is ever completely robotic. We sense the upwelling of love, joy, curiosity, altruism, sympathy, insight, and intuition. These are non-reactive responses. Diminish your automatic reactions and expand your responses to life here and now. Again, that is both the remedy and the goal. The fully conscious life is the best life. To discover that this is so, the place to begin is by getting unstuck.

 


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 latest books are The Healing Self co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. Chopra hosts a new podcast Infinite Potential and Daily Breath available on iTunes or Spotify
www.deepakchopra.com 

Should You Plan for Your Next Incarnation?

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Do you believe in reincarnation, and if so, does it matter? According to a 2018 Pew Research survey, 33% of Americans say they believe in reincarnation, yet it is beyond the range of ordinary polling to ask why this belief exists. In an age of faith, both East and West, a person’s daily life was deeply influenced by a religion’s teaching about the afterlife.

Questions of sin and redemption, karmic retribution, heavens and hells, and journeys through other bodies such as those of animals—these were pressing concerns for many centuries. Now in modern secular society, the question of surviving the extinction of the physical body has been channeled into belief versus science. We don’t ask if God finds us worthy to go to heaven so much as how credible a near-death experience might be according to the best research.

The scheme of belief versus science is something of a false divide, however. There has been credible research on reincarnation, which would surprise most people, including scientists. Pioneering studies were conducted by Ian Stevenson, chairman of the psychiatry department at the University of Virginia Medical School, who began investigating the phenomenon of young children who say they recall a past life. Hundreds of such cases were looked into with the aim of validating if the person they remembered being actually existed.

Stevenson traveled the world closely examining children’s memories and matching them to specific individuals, and not only were many validated, but some children even bore physical signs of injuries sustained when their previous incarnation died. After Stevenson’s death in 2010, the research was continued by another U. of V. psychiatrist, Jim Tucker, who presents some fascinating statistics in two books. In an online article that summarizes some of the more startling numbers,

  • Around 20% of young children claim to have memories of the time between death and birth.
  • 60% of children who claim to remember past lives are male.
  • Roughly 70% of such children remember an unnatural or violent death.
  • The average time spent between lifetimes is 16 months.
  • Such reports occur in general in children between the ages of 2 and 6, after which the phenomenon of remembering a past life wanes.

There has been no serious questioning of the validity of this research, and Tucker explains reincarnation in terms of natural phenomena. “Quantum physics indicates that our physical world may grow out of our consciousness. That’s a view held not just by me, but by a number of physicists as well.”

Without a doubt there’s a need in contemporary physics to account for consciousness in the universe. No physical explanation has been satisfactory in the past. People casually assume that as life evolved and became more complex, the primitive brains of lower species evolved into the massive brain of Homo sapiens. The physical evidence for that is unassailable. Yet no one has described why and how any brain is related to the mind. Brain cells do nothing so different from any other cell that their activity should produce a three-dimensional world complete with sights and sounds from an organ the texture of cold oatmeal that is totally dark and silent inside.

To overcome this huge gap in our understanding of reality, two trends have cropped up in physics—one is panpsychism, the notion that the universe contains traits of mind or proto-mind the way it contains matter and energy, the other the notion that information is at the root of mind, again with the assumption that the cosmos had this property from the very outset 13.8 billion years ago. Panpsychism and information theory are fashionable, but no one knows if they are valid explanations of mind or Band-Aids applied to keep physics patched together.

Without settling the unknowable future, one thing is clear. After decades of stubbornly insisting that only physical data are needed to explain everything about creation, some scientists are assigning validity to human perceptions—this is where the trail to reincarnation begins. I’m not referring to a full-blown leap into the arms of life after death. Instead, words like harmony, beauty, balance, and orderliness are acceptable in describing mathematics. Since mathematics is the fundamental language of physics, applying human terms, and subjective terms at that, to numbers is a radical step (despite the fact that mathematicians have spoken personally about the beauty of numbers for centuries).

A similar shift can be observed in evolution, where Darwin’s theory resulted over time in making evolutionary studies a matter of data and statistical distributions. The rigor of modern Darwinism may be a fig leaf to cover the obvious flaw in evolutionary studies—namely that no experiments on evolution can be conducted, since evolution either took place long ago or is proceeding now at a creepingly slow rate. Suddenly in recent decades so-called “soft” inheritance has broken the lockstep of rigid Darwinism. “Soft” inheritance holds that genes do not have to mutate to create evolutionary traits, as “hard” inheritance insists upon—after all, living things are born with a complement of genes that are fixed for life.

Thanks to a new field called epigenetics, it has become evident that a creature’s life experiences can actually be passed on to future generations via genetic markers that influence how DNA is triggered and regulated. Instead of an on-off switch, DNA operates more on a rheostat. Epigenetics may explain as much or more about the rise of species as the discovery of DNA itself.

I’ve skimmed through radical shifts in scientific thought to arrive at the real significance of reincarnation. What Nature presents, from the level of subatomic particles to the level of DNA, is an endless recycling. Just as physics tells us matter and energy cannot be destroyed, only transformed, the same is thought to apply to information and, going a step further, to consciousness. Everything in Nature is about endless transformation, and in the cosmic recycling bin, ingredients are not simply jumbled and rejumbled like balls in a Bingo cage.

Instead, as viewed in human perception, Nature exhibits evolution through three linked processes: memory, creativity, and imagination. Memory keeps the past intact, allowing older forms to contribute to new ones. Creativity allows for novelty so that recycling isn’t mere repetition of the same forms over and over. Imagination allows for invisible possibilities to take shape, either in the mind or the physical world.

If everything in Nature is recycling under the influence of memory, creativity, and imagination, it seems very likely that human consciousness participates in the same recycling. Or to put it another way, if human consciousness doesn’t recycle/reincarnate, we’d be outside a process that includes everything else in the universe but us. Is that really probable?

The argument for the probability of reincarnation, added to the research on children’s memories of past lives, is very persuasive, so the future of reincarnation looks bright. No one can credibly call it a mere belief or superstition or a holdover from the age of faith. But a probability is weaker than a certainty, and no one should plan on their next incarnation without a stronger argument, perhaps strong enough to approach certainty. That’s the enticing possibility we’ll discuss in the next post.
(to be cont.)

 


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 latest books are The Healing Self co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. Chopra hosts a new podcast Infinite Potential and Daily Breath available on iTunes or Spotify
www.deepakchopra.com 

 

Why Math Is Leading Us Deeper into Illusion

By Deepak Chopra, MD

It’s hard to imagine a world without numbers. The square footage of your house, the rent or mortgage payment, the weight you see on your bathroom scale are all examples of lower mathematics, while the GPS that guides your travels, your smartphone, and sending a space probe to Saturn are examples of higher mathematics. Yet the Pyramids and the Parthenon needed only lower math, little more than a few basic equations and the ability to count.

It seems absurd to call numbers a problem; they are too useful in every aspect of life. But if you aspire to go beyond your present state of consciousness, if you want to be happier, to find love, or to know yourself, mathematics is not only useless, it blocks the way. It traps you in an illusion and deepens the illusion in radical ways. Believe it or not, anything you can count, weigh, calculate, or measure is part of an all-embracing illusion—to grasp this fact will put you on the threshold to the “real” reality and your place in it.

I mean illusion in the most common sense of the word, the way a dream is an illusion. Imagine that you are dreaming one night, and inside your dream you can use numbers, measure things, and even pursue science. Obviously the ability to do these things would reassure you of the reality of your dream. But once the bubble is burst and you wake up, all the counting, measuring, and doing science would become instantly irrelevant.

Do you think this example doesn’t apply after you wake up? It does. To burst the bubble of numbers and the illusion they create, here are a few facts about the nature of a basic property of Nature, namely, light.

  • Photons, the elementary particles of light, are invisible and have no brightness whatsoever.
  • Light has two incompatible states, as a particle and a wave. Both can be measured, but how one state turns into another is a total mystery. We only can observe that it happens.
  • Color as a perception cannot be explained. Why red is red has nothing to do with its frequency or wavelength, any more than the sweet taste of sugar Is explained by counting the carbon atoms in a sugar molecule.
  • No one has the slightest idea why light exists in the first place.
  • The visual images you see in your mind’s eye cannot be explained by examining the brain.
  • The brain’s visual cortex has no pictures in it; indeed, it is totally dark and devoid of light.

If not shocked, I hope you are at least surprised to read these facts. What ties them together is one thing, a thing that marks the ultimate and total failure of mathematics: consciousness. Your consciousness gives light its brightness and color, creates images in our mind, and experiences the world as a theater of events in time and space.

For sticklers who believe I am exaggerating the failure of numbers on their own, to explain reality, please see a classic paper on the baffling relationship of math and reality, written by the eminent Princeton physicist Eugene Wigner in 1960 and entitled “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.” Wigner’s argument is dense, but he arrives at the conclusion that without an explanation of consciousness, mathematics has a totally mysterious relationship to reality.

Let’s concede that math can’t explain anything about consciousness. So what? Everyone depends on the world of technology, and the course of civilization has itself depended on mathematics ever since the first architectural measurements were made thousands of years ago using knots evenly spaced on a rope. If all of that is an illusion, welcome to it. That’s how most people would react. As for scientists, who have a deep aversion to “metaphysical” speculations, there’s a famous putdown in science, “Shut up and calculate.”

To get past “So what?” isn’t easy if you refuse to entertain the very notion that the everyday physical world is an illusion. But the existence of solid tangible objects was long ago undermined by quantum physics. If you delve deeply into the fabric of nature, the most basic level, the quantum field, is where “something comes out of nothing.” Mere ripples in the quantum field, arising from the quantum vacuum state, are the basis of the universe. And that’s an enormous clue to escaping the illusion.

There is a convincing argument that these ripples are products of consciousness; in other words, the universe thinks itself into existence. Decades ago the eminent British physicist Sir James Jeans declared that the universe was beginning to look much more like a great thought than a great machine. Mind-like behavior has been spotted in the action of elementary particles. Moreover, if the universe isn’t a product of some sort of cosmic consciousness—indeed, if existence isn’t the same as consciousness—science is totally unable to explain how consciousness came about. There’s no point at which atoms learned to think. Physical explanations for mind are the ultimate apples and oranges mistake.

When Nature created “something out of nothing,” two tracks emerged and separated. One track we call objective—the world “out there” filled with objects and events—and the other track we call subjective—the world “in here” of sensations, images, feelings, and thoughts. We are extremely good at balancing the two worlds. A physicist can measure Higgs bosons and also fall in love.

However, to define reality on either track is an illusion. On the objective side there is chaotic “quantum soup” constantly boiling away, totally separate from our everyday experience. On the other side is perceptual soup, the chaos of personal experiences that fill the mind (one can also call this “qualia soup,” using the technical term for the qualities of the five senses, in other words, everything we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell).

Both sides, as long as they are separate, falsify reality, which is why it isn’t absurd to say that numbers draw us deeper into an illusion. We deceive ourselves by assuming that the world “out there” isn’t the same as a dream, while at the same time our inner experiences are solipsistic without an external world. So by simple logic, reality dawns when the subject-object split is healed. Reality is wholeness, and we won’t experience it until we are whole. That will be the topic of the next post. Nothing can replace or substitute for wholeness, and yet this fact has yet to dawn for billions of people.

(To be cont.)

 


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 latest books are The Healing Self co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. Chopra hosts a new podcast Infinite Potential and Daily Breath available on iTunes or Spotify
www.deepakchopra.com 

Higher Consciousness in Less than a Minute

By Deepak Chopra, MD

There are very old, rich traditions of higher consciousness around the world, and diverse as they are, they seem to have one thing in common: Arriving at higher consciousness takes time, perhaps a lifetime. Along with this idea comes other, closely related ones. Higher consciousness is exceptional. It requires intense inner work. Only a select few ever reach the goal.

The overall effect of these ideas is to discourage the average person from even considering that higher consciousness is within reach. For all practical purposes, society sets those apart who have become enlightened, saintly, or spiritually advanced. In an age of faith such figures were revered; today they are more likely to be viewed as beyond normal life, to be admired, shrugged off, or forgotten.

Much of this is a holdover from the merger of religion, spirituality, and consciousness. For centuries there was no separating the three. Most traditional societies developed a priestly class to guard the sanctity—and privileged status—of reaching near to God. But these trappings are now outdated and even work against the truth, which is that higher consciousness is as natural and effortless as consciousness itself. If you are aware, you can become more aware. There is nothing to higher consciousness than this logical conclusion.

No matter who you are or what level of consciousness you think you are in, two things always apply. The first is that you use your awareness every day in all kinds of ways. You think, feel, wish, perceive, etc. The second thing is that you have constricted your awareness, through a process that the English writer Aldous Huxley called the reducing valve. Instead of finding yourself in a state of expanded awareness, you edit, censor, ignore, and deny many aspects of reality. The reducing valve squeezes “whole mind,” another term favored by Huxley, to a small flow of permissible thoughts, perceptions, and feelings.

The reducing valve takes years to form, and much of what happens consists of social conditioning, which shapes us almost unconsciously. There is the huge influence of negative experiences that give rise to fear, the memory of pain, and the desire to be less open and more closed off for the sake of defending yourself. But positive experiences also can constrict your awareness, because likes and dislikes operate together. “Yes to this” and “No to that” is like a pendulum whose swing we ride for a lifetime. So powerful are our reasons for reducing reality that we grow to fear, dislike, and deny the possibility of whole mind.

Yet by definition whole mind cannot be destroyed, only distorted. A simple example is contained in the word “Hello.” Whenever someone says hello, they open a channel of experience that has little to do with the dictionary definition of the word.

If you aren’t using the reducing valve, this is what “hello” can communicate:

  • Tone of voice
  • Mood
  • State of two people’s relationship
  • Memories of past encounters
  • Foretelling of what might happen next\
  • Signals of acceptance or rejection
  • Alerts to possible threat or, possible welcome.

Can so much be contained in a single word? Absolutely. The study of linguistics packs all these layered experiences inside everyday language. The next time someone says hello, open yourself to the wider experience you are having. Is the other person feeling friendly or indifferent? Are you reminded of old thoughts of this person? Does your mood suddenly change? What’s the vibe being created between you?

If a traffic cop stops you and walks up to your car, his hello and yours in reply have the same dictionary definition as when someone you are deeply infatuated with says hello. But the two encounters carry vastly different meanings, which our antennae always pick up. They pick up everything unless we use the reducing valve. But 99% of the time we do use it. We don’t want the traffic cop to see that we are angry, scared, annoyed, or guilty. Or we don’t want the lover we are infatuated with to see anything but what we think will seem desirable.

In a word, we feel safer and more in control by editing reality, and yet even if such feelings are attained, we pay a high cost. The reducing valve makes every situation a reflection or repetition of an older experience. It enforces routine. It puts other people, and ourselves, into a box. Very little is actually new and fresh, even though as viewed by whole mind, every moment is unique and unpredictable, open to infinite possibilities. Great painters have looked at the same trees, grass, clouds, and flowers that you pass by without notice and turned them into beautiful visions. Nothing is so mundane that is cannot be a source of wonder, creativity, love, and the deep satisfaction of being alive, here and now.

“Nothing is so mundane that is cannot be a source of wonder, creativity, love, and the deep satisfaction of being alive, here and now.”

That last sentence is the key—it opens the door to higher consciousness not just in a minute but instantly. You are naturally nothing less than whole mind; the reducing valve minimizes your potential by an unmeasurable extent. How do you measure the next opportunity to feel wonder after the opportunity has vanished? What value is lost when “hello” is a ritualized word with hardly any meaning once all the possible meanings have been squeezed out of it?

The motivation for expanding your awareness lies in those questions. You can do it here and now, without effort. Just realize clearly that higher consciousness is the most natural, effortless, and fulfilling way to live. From there, infinity follows.

 


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 latest books are The Healing Self co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. Chopra hosts a new podcast Infinite Potential and Daily Breath available on iTunes or Spotify
www.deepakchopra.com 

Infinite Potential – Make Your Own Myth / Dr. Jean Houston

In our final episode of Season 1, we come back to the most fundamental questions: who are we and what are we capable of. My guest today, Dr. Jean Houston, sees us as heroes in our own mythic journeys, here to realize our great calling. Jean Houston has worked with Joseph Campbell, Margaret Mead and even Hilary Clinton, and she now joins us to explore our roles in this time of profound shift. Today, we tap into our full human potential. And it truly is, infinite.