Wellness - The Chopra Foundation

After Gay Rights, Gay Spirituality

By Deepak Chopra, MD

It’s taken decades for gay activists to achieve the most basic right that every minority deserves: equality under the law. In principle one might say that the battle has been won, even if some states are dragging their heels and some groups mount fierce resistance. Thirty years ago, it took mass protests to push for major funding of AIDS research, and the overturning of antiquated, prejudiced sodomy laws wasn’t a sure thing when the Supreme Court took up the issue in 2003.

The fact that the court did invalidate state laws against homosexuality was the bellwether for a shift in public acceptance that will only accelerate in the future. It’s time, then, to consider another dimension that has been masked by the headlines over legal battles. That’s the dimension of spirituality, where religious intolerance has been the norm and finding the way to self-acceptance has been a poignant personal struggle for every gay man and woman.

The issues are framed by questions that millions ask every day without being gay, since they pertain to the loss of faith that society has been wrestling with for decades:

Does God love me?

Does he (or she) know that I exist?

Can God relieve my suffering?

Where was God when I endured my darkest hours?

It would be easy, and probably correct, to say that these questions are more pointed for gay people, because they are burdened by social disapproval, hidden prejudices, and long-held dogmas about God’s condemnation of homosexuality. Spirituality is a larger dimension of life, however, based on real personal needs. For gay people to realize their place in a living kind of spirituality, seven needs must be filled:

1. The need to safety and security.

2. The need to be recognized for achievement and success.

3. The need to belong to a community.

4. The need to be listened to and understood.

5. The need to express oneself through creativity and self-exploration.

6. The need for higher moral worth.

7. The need to feel at one with God or other depiction of highest Being.

I hate to announce it to accepted prejudice (both inside and outside the gay community), but in my experience, gay people have done more to fulfill these needs than society as a whole. They may have been forced to face themselves by hostile circumstances; they may be more compassionate and accepting of differences in general; it could be that feeling like outsiders has increased their self-awareness. I can’t point to an exact cause – no doubt there is a mixture of many causes – but the result has been an open kind of seeking that is one of the most valuable aspects of modern gay life.

Which of us has had to pay constant attention to being safe and secure when we walk down the street? Who feels automatically that their achievements will be undermined or their acceptance put into question simply because of who they are? Gay people confront both obstacles to the first two needs on the list, which are taken for granted by the majority population. The higher needs are just as tinged with self-doubt and negative social attitudes. What this means is that your gay friends and those happy gay couples kissing on their wedding day have gone through personal struggles you probably have only a little awareness of. Seeking for God comes down to seeking oneself in the grand scheme of things, and every gay person knows what that feels like.

Spiritual seeking is a huge topic, naturally. On one front most gay people have to come to terms with the religion they were brought up in. For Christians, a landmark is The Good Book by the late Peter Gomes, who held the position of Preacher to Harvard College. Gomes, who came out fairly late in life, devotes considerable space to the condemnation of homosexuality in the Bible, and his approach in the face of these condemnations is summarized in the book’s subtitle, “Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart.”

In other words, bringing a modern mindset and an open heart unfolds a new path, one that isn’t literally tied to the attitudes of Jewish culture thousands of years ago, or the extension of those attitudes by the early Christian fathers. For gay people who want to remain among the faithful, there are churches in every large city that will welcome them. Even the Catholic Church shows signs of softening its strictures under a new, more compassionate Pope.

Not having the church door slammed in your face is barely the first step in filling the spiritual dimension in a person’s life. The seven needs I’ve listed take a lifetime to fulfill, attended by inner work and a desire to keep evolving every day. At the very least the straight and gay world can agree on that, because seeking is a common human project. To fill the spiritual dimension requires a shift in attitudes in all of us. Gay people need to realize that they deserve to be fulfilled spiritually. Straight people need to agree.

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. The World Post and The Huffington Post global internet survey ranked Chopra #17 influential thinker in the world and #1 in Medicine. Chopra is the author of more than 80 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are Super Genes co-authored with Rudolph Tanzi, PhD and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. www.deepakchopra.com

A Revolution in Reality Is Around the Corner

Whether they think about it or not, people take sides about reality. The dividing line separating science from spirituality was crossed long ago, and it doesn’t take a lesson in philosophy or theology to pick up a smartphone. Therefore, by default reality for everyone is scientific reality. Let’s set the old science versus spirituality divide aside and simply accept that science has taken a journey to the very origin of reality and returned with a story everyone essentially buys into by virtue of how rational and useful it is to live by science.

To get to the origin of reality, science had to scrub away a lot of misinformation and misdirection. The five senses are the source of most misinformation, but so is the brain itself. When scrubbed down to the most basic level, reality as explained in quantum physics has no color, sight, sound, taste, or smell. So much for what the five senses consider real. Scrub even closer to the bone, and time and space vanish, too, even though the human brain depends upon both. When atoms and molecules vanish into probability waves, so does the brain–it has no privileged position in the universe. Surprising as it sounds, this whole apparatus of scientific experiments and useful technology can be scrubbed away until you reach a zero point, a timeless, dimensionless state from which the universe sprang.

Here’s the most fascinating part. The universe didn’t spring into existence with the big bang 13.8 billion years ago. That episode requires the existence of time and space. The big bang is an event constructed in the human mind as if we were there to witness it. “If” you could take the human brain back to the origin of the universe, the big bang is totally real. But that “if” is impossible. A human brain would disintegrate long before you got to the source of the big bang. In fact, the big bang itself had its own origin, which preceded time, space, matter, and energy. Even to visualize the big bang as an explosion is totally incorrect, because explosions only occur in the context of time and space.

So we are left with a startling conclusion. The origin of reality is outside our ability to explain it. Even mathematics, the last stand of the rational mind, can’t be proven to exist outside our mental awareness of numbers. Nothing can be shown to exist outside our awareness. This realization has caused a crisis in theoretical physics, among other areas like philosophy and theology, because on the one hand, the version of reality scrubbed down to zero seems absolutely valid while on the other hand, scrubbed-down reality has nothing we can see, touch, measure, experiment with, gather data about, or even conceive. (Every physicist I’ve debated concedes that all of theoretical physics exists in mathematical imagination, which is itself an activity in awareness.)

Let’s agree that reality is here and that it needs explaining. You can start with a spiritual or religious view of reality and take a parallel journey that scrubs it down to zero, or very close. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God” or “The Word was made flesh.” Those phrases speak of a creation that emerges from nothing more than a concept, but since this concept is empty, being merely some kind of “word,” there’s a huge problem. The original word emerged from an inconceivable state. So once again, starting from the very opposite worldview of science, scrubbing reality down to its origin leaves you with something inconceivable.

How do we get out of this paradoxical trap, where the mind takes us on a journey to find out where we came from, only to arrive at a place that has a sign saying, “Please leave your mind at the door. Only then can you enter”? The way out of this trap is to stop asking the wrong questions and start asking the right ones. Instead of asking how the world “out there” emerged from zero (what some physicists call the emergence of something from nothing), we could start with the only thing we know for sure and go from there.

What we know for sure is that we experience reality, and therefore the starting point is no longer zero. In truth, we live at the starting point of reality every day and every minute. Reality is experience itself. It’s a fluid, ever-renewing process that continually spins out the now. Unlike a telescope floating in deep space sending back data from distant galaxies, our minds are dynamic, active, and creative. Set aside the fruits of this creativity. Every mind travels a different arc of life experience. But this diversity disguises a common thread.

If you look at what your mind is doing right this minute, the following things are always occurring:

1. There is a constant stream of thoughts, feelings, sensations, and images.
2. We identify with this mental activity, using it to create our personal reality.
3. Confronting the bewildering phenomena that fills reality and floods the senses, we give words to each process, thus stopping the phenomenon in its tracks. A mystery like time turns into “time,” a term we grasp the way we grasp “rock” or “tree.”
4. In this way, our chief creative act is to manufacture a world of objects that perfectly fits one species of consciousness, our own. Animals exist in this objectified world, but we have no entry into their species of consciousness.
5. Therefore, we feel secure in our self-created reality, as if it existed before human beings appeared. In fact, there is no reality outside the mental activity taking place right this minute in our awareness.

It can take a bit of time to nail down each of these points, but people will accept them as unarguable given a chance to absorb what is going on. When you begin with “reality is experience in awareness,” there is a totally level playing field. Think about having a dream one night where Einstein, Buddha, Plato, and Mozart came to visit you. They start talking about how reality looks to them, each having a strong separate awareness of what their own reality is like. Yet you have no trouble knowing that Einstein, Buddha, Plato, and Mozart are in the same dream, inhabiting the same dreamscape. The fact that they play different roles in the dreamscape doesn’t change that basic shared fact.

It turns out, therefore, that reality can be explained as a state of awareness, and although there are billions of people playing out their own state of awareness, the big tent is one awareness that we all share. it is the awareness of having an experience and knowing what the experience is. Finding such a unified basis for reality should come as a tremendous relief, and it will, I believe, revolutionize life on Earth. We have all accepted science as the measure of the real world, yet soon the news will spread that science has scrubbed reality down to the zero point. This in essence gives us the freedom to start over again. We each have the opportunity to scrub our personal reality down, to discard what isn’t working and retain only what does work.

Here, I’d like to suggest, is what does work:

1. Creating personal reality as each person’s joyful challenge.
2. Seeing past the mask of materialism in order to elevate the inner world of awareness.
3. Fostering the evolution of consciousness as a self-directed project.
4. Granting equal status to everyone as conscious agents, equipped with the same ability to shape reality.
5. Refusing to buy into the state of separation, replacing it with a state of unity based on pure consciousness.

When we focus on these things, reality will shift dramatically. Once you realize that everything, absolutely everything, is an excitation in consciousness, the everyday world gets reduced to the same status as a dreamscape. Time, space, matter, and energy each tell a different story; each has a different feel. But you exist at the center of the dreamscape, knowing that time, space, matter, and energy are all excitations in consciousness. And then comes the kicker: You are that consciousness. This must be what Buddha experienced in a flash sitting under the Bodhi tree. The phenomenal world dissolved, replaced by one thing, consciousness itself. The same realization has been repeated countless times in other minds; the circumstances will look outwardly different, but the result is always the same. At the source of human awareness is the origin of reality. One history unfolds this truth on a mass scale, nothing will ever be the same again.

Good News: You Aren’t a Biological Robot

By Deepak Chopra, MD and Rudolph E. Tanzi, PhD

We live in a golden age for neuroscience, and new findings about the brain emerge almost by the month. with huge government backing, one foresees the day, which could be quite soon, when every significant region of the brain is correlated with all the things we use our minds for. But as often happens with exciting frontiers, there’s a tendency to exaggerate the conclusions being reached.

In the case of neuroscience, the overreach is immense, because from many quarters brain researchers keep piling up evidence for very misguided conclusions. All revolve around the notion that we are prisoners of brain activity, in essence trapped inside the chemical and electrical activity of brain cells. Since this activity follows totally deterministic laws, it must follow that we do the same. In the latest wrinkle of “biology is destiny,” our brains have turned us into biological robots. untitled-design

An extreme statement of this position recently appeared in the New York Times, where Robert A. Burton, former chief of neurology at the University of California San Francisco, writes, with damning finality, “. . . it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the experience of free will (agency) and conscious rational deliberation are both biologically generated illusions.” (Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/05/opinion/a-life-of-meaning-reason-not-required.html)This isn’t a novel idea, but the fact that others have touted it doesn’t add any validity.

On the face of it, Dr. Burton had to use “conscious rational deliberation’ to write his article, so such a thing obviously exists. He has trusted an illusion to tell him that his own thinking is an illusion, which is totally self-contradictory. If it seems puzzling that a biological robot, however complicated its hard wiring in the brain, could produce the output of Shakespeare, Mozart, and Rembrandt, the reason is that no robot did produce that output–the human mind did.

Getting neuroscientists to back away from the biological robot thesis is difficult, because the vast majority align themselves with an unproven assumption, that the brain produces the mind. Burton admits in his article that no one has any idea where thoughts comes from, yet he proceeds to assure us where they don’t come from, the mind. Brain is all; mind is simply one of its more intriguing byproducts. This is the fallacy of instrumentality, the same as saying that because musical instruments produce music, they also compose it. A piano doesn’t compose ragtime, and there is no proof that the brain produces thought.

All we can say with certainty is that the brain’s physical activity delivers precise correlations with mental activity. Burton makes much of the finding that if you electrically stimulate regions of the brain associated with disgust or empathy, people will experience those feelings. Yet long ago the pioneering Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield stimulated the motor cortex of patients undergoing brain surgery. As a result of stimulating neurons responsible for activating arm muscles, for example, the patient’s arm would fly up automatically.

Yet Penfield, a great proponent of mind over brain, was astute enough to ask the conscious patients if they had raised their arm. The answer was always no. Instead, patients said something like, “My arm just flew up.” This is enough to show that all of us separate the actions we freely choose from autonomic responses. We can’t be fooled about this. We never say, “My mouth ate some food” or “My hand wants to play the violin.” All the complicated findings in neuroscience are instrumental only. They tell us the equivalent of showing that music can’t be played without musical instruments. The piano is capable of nearly infinite patterns of notes when you consider tempo, dynamics, phrasing, melody, and harmony. This activity is the physical correlation of music, not music itself. The brain’s nearly infinite patterns aren’t thinking, either.

Until neuroscience can actually tell us where thoughts come from, until the link is made between the electrochemical firing of a brain cell and subjective experience, nothing valid can be said about how mind and brain are related. Their relationship has to be holistic. Instead of insisting, as neuroscience does, that brain produces mind, or taking the opposite position, that the mind creates the brain, there is no cause-and-effect between them. They are simultaneous phenomena. A thought is instantly registered in the mental and physical domain.

Where did they both come from? A single source, which is consciousness itself. In fact, brain and mind are two aspects of this deeper reality, where consciousness is the only “stuff” that’s ultimately real. At the moment, however, the concept that we are pre-determined, mechanistic brain puppets is pure science fiction. Decades ago someone joked that figuring out the brain is like putting a stethoscope to the outside of the Astrodome to figure out the rules of football. The fact that various brain experts now take the joke seriously indicates a bad misunderstanding of both brain and mind.

Dr. Rudolph Tanzi is the Director of the Genetics and Aging Research Unit and Vice-Chair of Neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is also the Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Tanzi discovered several Alzheimer’s disease (AD) genes and directs the Alzheimer’s Genome Project. He is now actively developing therapies for treating AD based on knowledge gained from genetics and lifestyle interventions. Dr. Tanzi has published over 475 papers and has received the Metropolitan Life Foundation Award, Potamkin Prize, the Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award, and was on the 2015 TIME100 Most Influential People in the World list. He also co-authored the New York Times Bestseller, “Super Brain” and “Super Genes” with Dr. Deepak Chopra.

How to See a Beautiful Person in the Mirror

By Deepak Chopra, MD and Kimberly Snyder, CN

Society has allowed our notion of beauty to go awry. Countless women–and not just women–look in the mirror and see a reflection of inadequacy. They have fallen short of an ideal that was defective to begin with. But conditioned since childhood to equate a “perfect” body with being beautiful, they blame themselves for being the defective one.

The situation is filled with cruel ironies. Children are naturally beautiful until they are taught to stop thinking that way and to start measuring themselves by an unnatural standard. Even the small percentage of women who are super-model thin suffer anxiety over gaining a pound. The first gray hair and wrinkles create panic. The worship of perfection belies the epidemic of obesity that constitutes reality for millions.

The problem has been diagnosed many times without a workable solution. One study after another has proven without a doubt that fad diets don’t work; in fact, the chances of becoming obese are higher for chronic dieters. Billions of dollars spent on cosmetics and plastic surgery have done nothing to solve a prevailing sense of not being beautiful enough. All of this points to a single underlying issue: a woman’s sense of lack.

In our view, this is the issue that must be addressed head on. If a person looks in the mirror and doesn’t see someone who is lacking, the way is open for seeing someone who is beautiful. A radical turn-around in social measures of beauty is necessary, and yet the good news is that such a turn-around is accessible by everyone. Let’s look at a few facts about the mind-body system that support our optimism. Untitled design(23)

1. Mind and body are connected through a network of messaging that alerts every cell in the body to our thoughts, moods, beliefs, hopes, fears, and expectations.

2. As a result, the body is amazingly sensitive to shifts in our mental state.

3. By using a simple measure–the percentage of positive input the mind-body system receives–the messaging to every cell can be improved and even optimized.

4. Working from the inside out, practices like yoga, meditation, and stress management have holistic benefits.

These facts have far-reaching implications for beauty. As a woman gains more positivity about herself, grounded in lifestyle changes in any area, the feedback loop that connects mind and body gets stronger. The person’s increased wellbeing increases, and with each step in this direction, a shift occurs in the brain, favoring even more positivity and less negativity. So what do we mean by positive input? In our holistic approach to beauty, which we call Radical Beauty, the range of possibilities is very broad:

* Pure food, water, and air.

* Avoiding physical and emotional toxins.

* Unprocessed, natural, organic food.

* Nurturing relationships.

* Good sleep.

* Exercise that favors lightness, balance, flexibility, and gracefulness.

* Attitudes of appreciation and gratitude.

* A higher vision of life.

* Service to others.

* Satisfying, meaningful work.

* Mediation and yoga.

* Increased self-esteem.

* The sense of being in control.

* Feeling safe.

* Feeling as if you belong.

* Daily close contact with family and friends.

* Generosity of self through acts of giving.

* Being loved and loving in return.

This is just a start on the holistic path, and every aspect comes naturally once we drop our unrealistic ideals and realize how fulfilling reality can be instead. Beauty should be measured by these things, and yet we aren’t shying away from or giving up on traditional beauty, which still has a place. The skin, for example, is the body’s largest organ and secrets more endocrine hormones than the endocrine glands. These hormones are carriers and signals of emotion. therefore, in the mind-body feedback loop, a glowing mood gets translated into glowing skin.

In the next post we’ll give more details about how our radical revision of beauty works, in what we call Radical Beauty. Here we wanted to open the discussion on a topic that everyone is involved in, leading to life-enhancing or self-destructive results. The purpose of beauty should always be life-enhancing, and we believe it can be, in very practical terms.

KIMBERLY SNYDER, C.N., is a nutritionist and the New York Times bestselling author of the Beauty Detox book series. Snyder has appeared as a nutrition and beauty expert on Good Morning America, Dr. Oz, Ellen, Access Hollywood, The Doctors, and Today and has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Elle, InStyle, as well as many others. The go-to nutritionist for many of the entertainment industry’s top performers, Snyder is also the creator of Glow Bio, an organic juice, smoothie and cleanse company. She hosts the top-rated podcast Beauty Inside Out on iTunes, and her blog, website, and products have spread the Beauty Detox movement to more than 150 countries. For more information, visit KimberlySnyder.com and RadicalBeauty.com.

Sonima’s Wisdom and Me

By Deepak Chopra, MD

The cutting-edge programs of the Sonima Foundation are based on an ancient wisdom principle. True wisdom occurs spontaneously, and in this case, I remember the story of how one child discovered it very early. Alfred Stieglitz, who became one of the greatest photographers of the twentie Screen Shot 2014-10-03 at 1.48.38 PM

th century, grew up in Hoboken, New Jersey. His father had fought for three years in the Union army before buying himself out so that he could be home to see his first child grow up.

One winter the boy was seen slipping out the back door, which at first seemed only a bit odd. It was the dead of winter and freezing cold. But when he kept doing it, his parents investigated. It turned out that Alfred was slipping money to a bedraggled vagrant without telling anyone.

The family wasn’t rich, and his father rebuked him. “Why are you giving your money to a stranger?”

“Don’t you see?” Alfred replied. “I’m doing it for myself.”

The same wisdom principle, that in helping others we help ourselves, could change the world. That’s why I feel so dedicated to the Sonima foundation, because they have taken an idea close to my heart—the wellbeing of children—and expanded it. Through a groundbreaking health and wellness program, the foundation is creating the leaders of the future who will be healthy in body, mind, and spirit.

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