Take Hope from the Healing Cycle

By Deepak Chopra, ™ MD

Right now the push to control the latest surges in Covid have focused on three things that have gained around-the-clock publicity: masks, distancing, and vaccines. Relying on them has given people hope in the face of the pandemic. But there are sources of hope, including a new one just added to the mix, that everyone should know about.

These sources of hope are based on an aspect of daily life that is ordinary and at the same time extremely complex and mysterious. Every day your body goes through a healing cycle. This cycle is the product of billions of years of evolution, setting in place many cycles, clocks, feedback loops, and chemical messaging. But the upshot is a total reset of the mind-body system every day. Anything that has gone out of balance is reset, and all the parts of the system once again mesh as they were designed to.

Your lifestyle either supports the healing cycle or hinders it. After decades of progress in the area of wellness, people’s lifestyles have been improving, but for many the onset of the Covid pandemic causes a major disruption, and for some, the roof caved in. Their lifestyles began to hinder the healing cycle in crucial ways.

  • Daily routines were thrown into chaos.
  • Exercise got neglected.
  • Passive distractions like texting and surfing the Internet took up more time.
  • Meaningful work declined.
  • Human contact was severely diminished.
  • Symptoms of anxiety and depression were magnified.
  • Stress took a larger toll than normal.
  • Sleep became erratic.

Some fascinating new research from many sources is pointing to sleep as the key. For a long time our busy modern lifestyles have worked to the detriment of getting a good night’s sleep. At the same time, ironically, the importance of regular sound sleep has grown enormously. The arrival of the Covid pandemic has widened this gap between how we live and how we should live.

Specifically, researchers have spotted that levels of melatonin, the “Sleep Hormone,” seem to be involved in who gets infected and suffers serious illness, followed by potentially long-lasting damage to the nervous system. The conclusion of a long, detailed article at The Atlantic website offers a remarkably hopeful possibility: Melatonin might block the virus.

After reading the article you might be motivated to start taking melatonin, which is readily available over the counter, but one shouldn’t blithely alter the body’s hormone cycles. Covid isn’t going to be prevented with a supplement. The larger picture concerns the healing cycle. Melatonin levels point to a deeper factor, which is sleep itself. Sleep is connected to everything that happens when you undergo the healing cycle every day.

Insomnia and various sleep irregularities throw off biorhythms and hormone cycles—that much has been well established. Sleep deprivation is associated with almost anything that a hormone influences, which makes things so all-embracing that medical research is forced to isolate and study small parts of the entire picture, such as the relationship between bad sleep and type 2 diabetes, obesity, sleep apnea, and depression.

Medicine is concerned with pathologies of every kind, but the healing cycle is about wellness as a whole. To support the healing cycle, you need to address your daily routine and do everything you can to correct the disruptions caused by the pandemic. Passively waiting for the vaccine has no prevention value, and there is some research connected to flu vaccines showing that people who get a good night’s sleep in the days before getting a flu shot receive more effectiveness form the vaccination.

In practical terms, the following steps should be given priority, because they relate directly to improving your sleep and getting the most out of the healing cycle:

  • Go to sleep at the same time every night, including weekends.
  • Spend time out in the sun on a daily walk, since sunlight promotes melatonin levels.
  • Exercise every day, at the least getting up and stretching every hour.
  • Don’t look at bright screens for two hours before bedtime. Their blue light suppresses melatonin levels.
  • Reduce passive distractions and increase creative activities and work that is challenging to your mind. The healing cycle is thrown off by a passive lifestyle.
  • Give sleep a priority rather than doing other things late at night.

The need for these measures has always existed; Covid simply brought them into high relief. Restoring the healing cycle to its natural functioning has benefits extending far beyond the pandemic. But you should consider this a foundation, not the complete answer.

The other disruptions I mentioned above can’t be overlooked. Lockdowns and social distancing automatically reduce human contact. People at younger ages are prone to sudden exposure to what a bad old age feels like: isolated, lonely, depressing, and boring. At a minimum, you need to keep up human contact and become part of an active support system, even if this contact is at a distance and involves phone calls rather than going out to lunch or meeting at work.

From every direction, one hears that the pandemic is leading to a major reset on a global scale. What will actually come about is still speculative. We are living under emergency conditions, which gives priority to emergency measures. But on your own, you can undertake the most important reset that matters personally. Reset the healing cycle, and you will be prepared for emergency conditions and the world that will emerge after the emergency subsides.

 


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

What Happened to Emotional Intelligence?

By Deepak Chopra, ™ MD

For many younger people, the COVID virus outbreak will bring their first experience of fear and anxiety as a pervasive mood. Anxiety is difficult for everyone, but in the larger scheme, we need to ask: What happened to emotional intelligence? The phrase became popular for a while, but that was almost a generation ago. Right now, emotional intelligence seems to be forgotten, or to put it another way, it is unknown to most people.

Social forces can drive you to feeling anxious; politics stokes anger; personal threats to your well-being can lead to worry and depression. But none of these forces has a positive effect in giving you tools to ward off anxiety, anger, and depression. Raising your emotional IQ is something each person must confront on their own. Let’s focus on anxiety, which the current crisis has stoked more than any other negative emotion (although anger over politics runs a close second).

I believe that freeing yourself from fear and anxiety is possible. More than that, you can learn how to be free of fear long after the COVID crisis has passed.
The key is to cultivate emotional intelligence. The term might go in and out of fashion, but the value of emotional intelligence never changes, and when you focus on it, you will achieve something worthwhile for life. Here are six principles to guide you through the process.

  • Commit to never complaining, criticizing, or playing the victim.
  • Imagine a creative, positive future for yourself.
  • Don’t regret the past. It no longer exists.
  • Be present in every situation as it occurs.
  • Be independent of other people’s criticism or approval.
  • Be responsive to feedback.

It is fair to say that hardly anyone hits upon these principles by trial and error or through experience of life. A person can live a long time without paying attention to emotional intelligence, and among men, the word “emotion” too often connotes something undesirable, as if showing emotional sensitivity is a sign of weakness.

But emotional intelligence is gender-neutral. The fact that humans can observe their emotions is a remarkable trait, and once you begin to observe your own emotions, you can counter the power of an unwanted emotion like fear and anxiety. Whether we admit it or not, emotions fascinate us, as Hollywood well knows. Empathizing with emotions onscreen is easy and pleasurable, but we are too attached to our own emotions, and it takes very little experience of anxiety, humiliation, rejection, and failure to train us to avoid the minefield of emotions in general.

So it’s worth saying that developing emotional intelligence isn’t scary or difficult. All you need to do is notice and pay attention. By pausing and standing back a little, you can observe how you are reacting at any given moment. You can even turn the six principles into questions posed to yourself.

  • Am I complaining, criticizing, or playing the victim?
  • Do I see my future in a creative, positive way?
  • Am I pointlessly reliving the past?
  • Do I see what’s going on right now?
  • Am I afraid of someone else’s criticism or craving their approval?
  • Am I listening to what other people are trying to tell me?

These are not mysterious or metaphysical questions. We can pause to ask them any time we want, and we should. But we are blocked by old conditioning and the habit of feeling uneasy about our emotions. There is a great deal of social pressure to behave with very low emotional intelligence, a kind of dumbing down on the feeling level. As a result, we act in self-defeating ways. To give a few examples,

  • We repeat the same reactions in most situations.
  • We imitate how others behave, starting with our family.
  • We act on impulse without a second thought.
  • We don’t really see how others are reacting to us.
  • We let negative emotions like fear, anger, envy, and resentment have their way.
  • We easily go into denial and seek outside distractions.

A whole way of life is implied in these examples, and when collective fear mounts, as it is right now, people often have little or no idea how to escape. Denial and distraction simply become more intensified, and playing the victim is more tempting than usual. Alternatively, we tell ourselves that we need to stay in control more than ever. But what is needed isn’t emotional self-control but emotional resilience.

Resilience is the most important single aspect of emotional intelligence. You allow your emotions to rise and fall naturally, without trying to stop or control them. Once an emotion has passed, you feel better, and you are able to return to a state of peace and calm. The opposite of emotional resilience is seen when people are stiff, reserved, bottled up inside, censorious, aloof, proud, or remote. In all of these cases past experience has made certain emotions unacceptable. The only way to deal with them is through avoidance. One is reminded of the adage that trees can be blown over by a storm while grasses bend without breaking.

Because the mind by nature is restful, alert, quiet, and at peace, that state of balance is the basis for developing emotional intelligence. You need the experience of balance in order to return to it at will. The experience comes naturally to everyone unless it is thrown off by stress and crisis. Then it takes a bit of intervention on our part, through meditation preferably. Meditation no only returns the mind to its balanced state, but it also allows you to observe what is happening, to experience it directly, and to identify with the quiet state of mind.

Ultimately, this is how fear can be escaped permanently. Meanwhile, everyone can benefit from lessening the anxiety being experienced all around us. Emotional intelligence goes a very long way to expanding your awareness and making you free of stress and anxiety right now.

 


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

Did Life Create the Universe?

By Deepak Chopra, ™ MD

No matter how life began on Earth—there are still some huge gaps in our knowledge about that—it seems indisputable that the universe set up the conditions for life. But a radical twist has now been offered by the prominent stem-cell biologist Robert Lanza and theoretical physicist Matej Pavšič in their deliberately startling new book, The Grand Biocentric Design. As Lanza bluntly declares in the book’s introduction, “Life is not a product of the universe but the other way around.” Lanza calls this theory “biocentrism,” which he introduced in his 2010 book of the same name.

On the face of it, saying that life created the universe is preposterous as long as the Big Bang and all the accepted steps leading to the creation of Earth are true. Yet what if they are just the assumptions of a current scientific model or paradigm? By definition a paradigm shift calls into question the rock-solid assumptions on which the previous paradigm rests.

Biocentrism aims to topple any version of reality based on physicalism, the doctrine in science that roots reality in physical objects from quarks to galaxies and on to multiple universes. Physicalism created the modern world of science and technology. But having reached the horizon where time, space, matter, and energy come into existence, physicalism reached a dead end. This was (and still is) the last thing anyone expected. In place of a crowning, all-embracing Theory of Everything, investigators found themselves faced with logic-defying questions.

What came before time? What lies outside space? How did matter acquire a mind, or is it the other way around?

These questions are self-contradictory. Logically there cannot be anything before time, because “before” is a time-bound concept. There cannot be anything outside space, because “outside” is a space-bound concept. To break out of self-contradiction, you have to abandon spacetime causality which science is extremely loath to do. Asking a scientist to abandon physical causality is like asking the Pope to be an atheist.

Biocentrism challenges the bedrock dogmas of physical science, and it does so by putting mind ahead of matter. The prime mover in creation is consciousness, the invisible creator behind the mask of the physical universe. This notion isn’t novel to Lanza and Pavšič, but their new book details the argument in unsurpassed detail.

The pivotal chapter in The Grand Biocentric Design is “How Consciousness Works,” and the pivotal sentence in the chapter is this: “Consciousness encompasses all of reality—the two are essentially synonyms.” Although the authors make much of the dead-end that physicalism has reached, and about how mainstream science stubbornly resists any challenge to its deepest long-held assumptions, all of us are involved in the declaration that reality is consciousness.

Like the serpent devouring its tail, we are back to a saying from Vedic India that is thousands of years old: “As you are, so is the world.” Lanza and Pavšič go into intricate detail to support this conclusion, which the ancient seers arrived at solely through introspection. But the two paths join on a level playing field, over which flies a banner proclaiming “Only consciousness can explain consciousness.” The irreducible fact of the universe, in other words, isn’t a thing, no matter how small and exotic the thing is (e.g., quarks, Higgs boson, superstrings). The irreducible fact, in human reality at least, is that we exist as conscious beings.

Nothing can get around this fact (which was stated in a 1931 interview by Max Planck, the renowned German physicist who first named the quantum). What biocentrism involves, once the door to the new paradigm is flung open, is process. Physicalism was a whiz at unlocking the processes by which the laws of nature operate. However, when faced with explaining how lumps of matter, namely, the quadrillions of organic molecules in the human brain, manage to think, physical explanations become a mere waving of hands.

The needle of a thermostat on the wall traces the rise and fall of the temperature in a room, but thermostats don’t create temperature. Brain imaging can detect in fine detail how brain activity parallels mental activity. Certain parts of the brain will light up when you get very angry, while other parts will light up when you meditate, have sex, feel depressed, and so on. But brain cells don’t create thought. At bottom a brain cell is activated by the exchange of sodium and potassium ions across the cell membrane. It isn’t possible to start there and draw a reasonable line of explanation to thoughts, feelings, sensations—indeed the entire world “in here” that is the domain of consciousness.

By turning to the processes by which consciousness operates, The Grand Biocentric Design provides a wealth of evidence in support of the notion that everything in existence is consciousness modifying itself. The book’s two-pronged approach, calling upon both biology and physics, is one of its strengths and also one of its most unique points. If these two branches of science can’t be unified in a single theory, biocentrism won’t satisfy either biologists or physicists.

The book’s lofty aims and deep explorations could have been too daunting for non-scientists, but The Grand Biocentric Design is accessible and engaging, in short, a very good read. Nearly a century ago the eminent English physicist-astronomer Sir James Jeans declared that “the Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine.” To this day it remains a daring venture to follow up the implications of that statement. No one has gone further, or more convincingly than Lanza and Pavšič do here. If it ever becomes accepted wisdom that “the universe as mind” is true, The Grand Biocentric Design will be looked upon as a significant milestone along the way.

When the mathematical philosopher Bertrand Russell declared, probably apocryphally, that only three people in the world (including Russell, naturally) understood Einstein’s mind-bending theory, few doubted it.

Relativity explained how objects larger than atoms and subatomic particles behave, while quantum mechanics explained how the very smallest things behaved, taking the scope of physics from smaller than the smallest to larger than the largest, to borrow an ancient Sanskrit phrase. By the 1970s a common assumption arose that physics was on the verge of a Theory of Everything that would reduce the mechanics of space, time, matter, and energy to a unified set of equations.

That the Theory of Everything never arrived, that the confidence of fifty years ago would unravel into a crisis that has shaken physics to its roots, is the starting point of The Grand Biocentric Design.

 


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

You and Your Brain: Upgrading the Relationship

By Deepak Chopra, ™ MD

Although the marvels of the brain as an organ have been wondered at for decades,
there’s a risk that science will make us feel like brain puppets. Neuroscience runs this
risk by assuming, without any proof, that our brains think, feel, perceive the world, and
make choices. In reality the brain is an instrument at the service of the mind. We cannot
live without it, just as we cannot live without a heart, but by promoting the brain into a
thinking machine (an M.I.T. professor who championed Artificial Intelligence dubbed the
brain “a computer made of meat”), we demote ourselves.

You are much more in charge of your biology than you think. Your experiences
constantly change your brain. Much of the time we fail to pay attention to how we
relate to the brain, but no relationship is more important. One thing the human brain
does, in fact, share with computers: It is programmable. We primarily use this fact the
wrong way around. Instead of programming our brains to be open, creative, alert, and
quiet, we program it to carry out a hundred short cuts.

For example, when a server asks you how you want your burger done or whether you
want brown, white, or fried rice with your Chinese meal, it typically takes approximately
one-fifth of a second to give your response. In a restaurant this trained reflex is
harmless, but it also takes the same amount of time to shoot back a response if
someone asks, “Do you believe in God?” or “Who are you voting for?”

In place of a dynamic relationship, being driven by habits, reflexes, conditioning, and
thoughtless opinions gives the brain too much power. In sci-fi a standard plot has robots
taking over the world, but right now most people are dominated by a robotic brain. The
old view of the brain as fixed for life, constantly losing neurons and declining in function,
has been abolished. The new brain is a process, not a thing, and the process heads in
the direction you point it in.

A Buddhist monk meditating on compassion develops the brain circuitry that brings
compassion into reality. Depending on the input it receives, you can create a
compassionate brain, an artistic brain, a wise brain, or any other kind. That’s why your
brain is—or should be—your most important relationship.

The agent that makes these possibilities become real is the mind, or consciousness. The
brain doesn’t create its own destiny. Genetics delivers the brain in a functioning state
so that the nervous system can regulate itself and the whole body. It doesn’t take your
personal intervention to balance hormone levels, regulate heartbeat, or do a thousand
other autonomic functions. But you can have a powerful experience, such as falling in
love, going to war, or winning the lottery, and your experience will alter all these
processes.

If you think of everyday experience as input for your relationship with your brain, with
your actions and thoughts as output, a feedback loop is formed. The old adage about
computer software—garbage in, garbage out—applies to these feedback loops. Toxic
experiences shape the brain quite differently from healthy ones. Neuroscience has
joined forces with genetics to reveal that right down to the level of DNA, the feedback
loops that unite mind and body are profoundly changed by the input being fed the
brain.

If input is everything, then happiness and well-being are created by giving the brain
positive input. Without realizing it, you are here to inspire your brain to be the best it
can be. This is much more than positive thinking, which is often too superficial and
masks underlying negativity. The input that inspires the brain includes a wide array of
things. They form a matrix with you at the center. Here’s what you want in your matrix.

Matrix for a Positive Lifestyle

  • Have good friends.
  • Don’t isolate yourself.
  • Sustain a lifelong companionship with a spouse or partner.
  • Engage socially in worthwhile projects.
  • Be close with people who have a good lifestyle – habits are contagious.
  • Follow a purpose in life.
  • Leave time for play and relaxation.
  • Maintain satisfying sexual activity.
  • Address issues around anger.
  • Practice stress management.

 

Your brain will thrive in such a matrix, even as life brings its ups and downs. By the same token, the brain can’t arrive at any of these things on its own. You are the leader of your brain. The whole issue of feedback loops turns out to be vital for all kinds of brain functions, including memory and the prevention of feared disorders like Alzheimer’s. A healthy relationship with your brain leads to a state of peak living over a long, healthy lifetime. Society failed to teach us this invaluable lesson, but it’s never too late to learn. 

 


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 Spread of “Stranger Than We Can Think”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 


DEEPAK CHOPRA™ MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a modern-day health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. Chopra is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is the author of over 89 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His 90th book, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, unlocks the secrets to moving beyond our present limitations to access a field of infinite possibilities. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.”
Menas C. Kafatos is the Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor of Computational Physics at Chapman University. Author, physicist and philosopher, he works in quantum mechanics, cosmology, the environment and climate change and extensively on philosophical issues of consciousness, connecting science to metaphysical traditions. Member or candidate of foreign national academies, he holds seminars and workshops for individuals, groups and corporations on the universal principles for well-being and human potential. His doctoral thesis advisor was the renowned M.I.T. professor Philip Morrison who studied under J. Robert Oppenheimer. He has authored 334 articles, is author or editor of 20 books, including The Conscious Universe, Looking In, Seeing Out, Living the Living Presence (in Greek and in Korean), Science, Reality and