For Deepak Chopra, it is usually misleading to speak of God’s love, for the word is “being used to mean the kind of deep affection and caring that is human love. But God’s love doesn’t pick and choose, so it applies to serial killers, Adolf Hitler, Chairman Mao, and all other monsters in history. It applies to all criminal acts as well as to holy acts. Divine love is more like a natural force field—gravity, for instance—than a human emotion.
“Infinite, eternal, and love simply aren’t the right words. They force God into a mental box where he won’t fit. Faith brought us to a level playing field where God is a real possibility. Beyond faith lie experiences that cannot be put into worlds. Yet the path is real, and the ability to make the journey is imprinted in the human mind itself.
“The journey has already begun by acknowledging that it is impossible to think about God the way we think about everything else. All the thinking and talking about God that we do is symbolic; thankfully symbols can point the way. But as long as you have a personal stake in the world, you are not one with God.
“I apply the same standards to God that we ordinarily apply to reality. Reality doesn’t come and go. It doesn’t abandon us. What changes is how we relate to it. In the interval between birth and death, we all come to grips with reality; thus, consciously or not, we are coming to grips with God.
“Sometimes suffering is so incomprehensible that illusion comes as the only comfort. Ultimately all suffering is the result of the fragmented mind, personal and collective. Violence is rooted in collective psychosis. The cure is transcendence to God consciousness. My challenge is to make this real. In the meantime, each of us must find consolation as we can.
“If God is everywhere, like the air we breathe, why is he so hard to find? Because everything you say about him is open to contradiction. Any quality you give to God is an illusion. When in doubt, an easy test is to substitute reality for God. Is reality loving or unloving? The question makes no sense. Reality is all-inclusive. It simply is. Once your mind begins to wrap itself around an all-inclusive God, one who simply is, you are truly escaping illusion.
If God is the creative source of
everything,
And if God is in us,
The creative source of everything is in us.
“Faith doesn’t have a size, big or small. It’s a state of mind; either you are in that state or you aren’t.
“If I had to name one motivator that turns someone into a seeker, it would be this: People want to be real. The will to believe, which in earlier centuries was focused on God, has morphed into a yearning for a real life, one that holds together, that is rich in meaning and purpose, that brings fulfillment.
"The rules for making God real are the ones that construct the real world. They can easily be stated:
1. You are not a passive receiver taking in a fixed, given reality. You are processing your experience at every second.
2. The reality you perceive comes from the experience you are processing.
3. The more self-aware you are, the more power you will have as a reality-maker.
“No one has ever surrendered to God except by mistrusting the material world and following hints that lead in another direction.
Chopra sees near-death experiences as “hints from the subtle world,” and he affirms: “Subtle actions pervade life.” For instance, “If you trust your partner loves you, that’s a subtle action.” Moreover, “God is everywhere in the subtle world. The divine doesn’t appear by glimpses, in peak moments with sudden blinding light. The divine is constant; it is we who come and go.
“Your brain, despite its marvels, requires basic training when you learn
any new skill, and finding God is a skill. New neural pathways must be formed,
which will happen automatically once you put focus, attention, and intention
behind it.
If God is reality,
And if reality is consciousness,
Then God is consciousness.
Deepak Chopra, The Future of God: A Practical Approach to Spirituality for Our Times (Harmony Books, 2014).
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