Chopra: the source of nature is not nature

Deepak Chopra is a physician-scientist, author, and activist. His life’s work is summed up by this statement: “The Chopra Foundation’s Mission is to participate with individuals and organizations in creating a critical mass for a peaceful, just, sustainable, and healthy world through scientifically and experientially exploring non-dual consciousness as the ground of existence and applying this understanding in the enhancement of health, business, leadership and conflict resolution.” 

In his book The Future of God he writes: “In reality you are completely connected to God, since we are talking about the source of existence. But only when you transform your own awareness will God become clear, real, and useful.”

Chopra quotes Einstein: “Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature, and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible, and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am,” Einstein said, “in fact, religious.”

Einstein also affirmed that: “Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.”

“By middle age, Einstein had rejected a personal God, putting himself beyond the confines of the Judeo-Christian tradition. But not entirely: When he was fifty, an interviewer asked Einstein if he had been influenced by Christianity, to which he replied, ‘I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene.’ Clearly surprised, the interviewer asked if Einstein believed that Jesus had actually existed. ‘Unquestionably. No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life.’

“What separates me from most so-called atheists,” Einstein explained, “is a feeling of utter humility toward the unattainable secrets of the harmony of the cosmos.” And in 1930 he affirmed: “To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly, this is religiousness.”

For Chopra, “When you remove the illusions that you trust in, what remains is the truth, and the ultimate truth is God.”

This includes any scientific explanation of how life appeared in the cosmos. “DNA is a chemical but in order to explain its structure, you must invoke physics. The sequence of events that led from the Big Bang to DNA is a single chain as far as physics is concerned. The same laws of nature must be at work; there can’t be any breaks in the chain, or DNA wouldn’t have come about.

“It would only have taken a few dropped stitches,” Chopra notes, “billions of years ago, for the whole enterprise to have collapsed—for example, if water didn’t emerge from the combination of oxygen and hydrogen. The early cosmos was full of free-floating hydrogen and oxygen, as it is today. DNA cannot exist without water, and the water must have been in abundance for hundreds of millions of years. Since 99.9999 percent of the oxygen and hydrogen in the universe didn’t turn into water—add as many decimal places as you like—the fact that water appeared on Earth isn’t a matter of probable steps. Quite the opposite—arguments for the uniqueness of life on Earth still hold enormous power, and they don’t have to be arguments based on a biblical God.”

Chopra agrees with biologist Francis Collins, who affirms in The Language of God: “God cannot be completely contained within nature.” Chopra writes: “Collin’s belief in a transcendental God permeates every spiritual tradition for a very good reason—the source of nature cannot be found by looking around at nature.”

The Chopra Foundation, https://www.choprafoundation.org/about/mission/.

Deepak Chopra, The Future of God: A Practical Approach to Spirituality for Our Times (Harmony Books, 2014).