Deepak Chopra: wisdom, faith, and truth

“Wisdom supports faith, because both are about invisible things. Both must be tested one person at a time to see if they are valid. As with God, wisdom is valid only if it’s practical from day to day. I’d venture that it is a mark of wisdom to believe in God. What makes it wise is simply that faith makes life better. 

“Wisdom is discovered inside a situation; it is elusive and changeable. You cannot confine it to rules and adages. Most of the time wisdom startles us because it is so contrary to reason and common sense. Self-awareness plunges us into the sad knowledge that we were born to suffer. But at the same time it offers a solution: the path of wisdom.

“To Buddha, God and the soul were question marks, because the seeker after God doesn’t even know who ‘I’ am. Nothing is closer to each of us than our sense of self, but if it remains a mystery, what good does it do us to pursue higher mysteries?

“Truth isn’t found in words but through insight and self-discovery. Truth isn’t taught or learned. It is wrapped inside consciousness itself. Your consciousness must deepen until what is false has been left behind. Then truth will exist by itself, strong and self-sufficient.

“The reason that the average person cannot live the pure teachings of Jesus or Buddha is that these teachings depend upon higher consciousness. Otherwise, turning the other cheek will get you beaten up twice as badly. Burning yourself up to protest the Vietnam War will be an act of futile pain. Even devoting yourself to sick, orphaned babies in Calcutta might bring painful disillusionment. Most of the time, in fact, the teaching of wisdom can’t be applied effectively to the surface of life. An inner revolution must occur along the way."

For Chopra, the Buddha’s “Eightfold Path represents a way to find out who you really are by inviting your awareness to reveal what this path really involves. The mystery of Buddha’s cure is this: What you seek you already are."

Chopra agrees with Einstein’s insight: “Whatever there is of God in the universe, it must work itself out and express itself through us.” In a sentence Einstein outlines the agenda of wisdom. Wisdom is the divine working itself out and expressing itself through us. “Wisdom reveals that suffering comes and goes while a deeper reality never changes. That reality is founded on truth and love.

“Faith makes life better because in the midst of pain and suffering, we need to trust that something else is more powerful. Your present self, in its unawakened state, isn’t your enemy or a cripple or a failure. It is Buddha waiting to realize itself. It’s the seed of wisdom needing to be nurtured.

“Faith sees the divine in every aspect of creation. All the world’s wisdom traditions declare that there is only one reality, which embraces any conceivable phenomenon.

“Establishing that miracles exist requires two steps. First, we have to take down the wall that separates the natural from the supernatural. Fortunately, that’s fairly easy to do since the wall was artificial to begin with. The basis of everything in the physical world is the quantum domain. If anything deserves to be called the zone of miracles, it is this level of nature. Here the laws that make miracles ‘impossible’ are fluid. The constraints of space and time as we know them do not exist."

The second step involves acknowledging that: “The vast physical mechanism we call the universe behaves more like a mind than like a machine. How did mind ever find a way to manifest as the physical world? That question brings us to the merging of the natural and the supernatural, because the very fact that anything exists is supernatural—literally beyond the rules of the natural world."

 

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