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).

Deepak Chopra: faith, mind, and science

Deepak Chopra turns to the Vedic tradition for an understanding of faith. In the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna says to Arjuna: “Everyone’s faith comes from the perceptions of the mind. O Arjuna, the ego-personality is the living embodiment of faith. Your faith is your identity.”

Chopra suggests: “Blind faith and blind unbelief have other attributes in common. They both refuse to be tested. They condemn the other side. They depend on strong emotional attachments. The main difference is that unbelief disguises its blindness behind a veil of reason.

“Faith is a stage on the way to true knowledge of God. By that standard, blind faith is questionable but not fatal—far from it. As a mystical act, blind faith can open up subtle aspects of the mind. It can lead to an expanded view of reality and allow a person to see himself or herself as multidimensional, existing on other planes beyond the physical.

“Any form of us-versus-them thinking strikes me as bad faith. Religions draw into tight camps where their God is the only true God, for tribal, political, and theological reasons. I find none of them justified.^"

Chopra agrees with the statement by physicist David Bohm: “In some sense man is a microcosm of the universe; therefore what man is, is a clue to the universe.” Chopra adds, “Since the only universe we can know comes to us through our minds, it may be that our minds shape reality."

Nonetheless, he explains, “We need to be clear about a very basic point: The visible universe isn’t the same as reality. When solid objects are reduced to atoms and then to subatomic particles, they are not longer solid. They are clouds of potentiality. As physics defines it, potentiality is neither matter nor energy but completely intangible, no matter how solid a mountain may be or how powerful a lightning bolt. Particles in such a state aren’t even particles anymore. They do not have a specific location in space; instead, every particle emerges from quantum waves that can extend infinitely in all directions."

Furthermore, “Dark energy is enlarging the space between galaxies faster than the speed of light. So something beyond space and time serves as the major force for creation and destruction in the cosmos, and whatever it is, it will be as invisible as mind, God, the soul, and higher consciousness.

“A universe that is meaningless can’t be divine. Random activity undermines all sense of purpose. A mind that arose out of electrochemical activity can’t know revelation or epiphany. The choice, for once, does come down to either/or. To me, it is self-evident that spiritual experiences exist, that we act out of free will, and that our lives have meaning. One might claim, with deep conviction, that ‘natural religion’ grew out of human experience, age upon age.

“Science doesn’t describe reality, because no school of philosophy has ever proved that the physical universe is real. (Even Stephen Hawking, no believer in God, has attested to this.) We assume that physical things are real, on the evidence of the information that enters through the five senses. But that is the same as saying that we accept reality subjectively.

“The surprising result is that God is on a level playing field with stars, galaxies, mountains, trees, and the sky. None of them can be objectively validated. ‘This rock feels hard’ is no truer than ‘I feel God’s love.’ But it’s no less true, either, as feeling is one sure way to navigate through the world.

“We are all embedded in the worldview of materialism; therefore the assumption that spiritual experiences must be unreal has become an article of faith. To love God isn’t different from loving science, if that is what shapes your life at its very core. In bad faith, we insist our beliefs should define reality for everyone. In good faith, we make the most of what we love and desire no less for everyone."

Deepak Chopra, The Future of God (2014), 1-92.

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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).

NDE convinces biophysicist that afterlife is real

Biophysicist Joyce Whiteley Hawkes writes: “My near-death experience established a connection between me and something much, much bigger than myself. If it is a part of God, the Source of Creation, the bond has never failed. I lost my fear of death, and with it, my fear of separation from the Source. I lost any notion that the Source is available to only the few who belong to a specific religion. The Healing Presence of the Source is for everyone.” Her experience led her to shift the focus of her life from cell research to cell healing. Hawkes asserts: “the body can be experienced as a sacred temple of the spirit and an expression of consciousness. This knowledge is the first step toward a life of fullness and oneness of spirit and physical existence—a seamless connection from Soul to Cell.”

“Before my near-death experience,” Hawkes acknowledges, “I thought there was no afterlife and, consequently, no continuation of consciousness. In my view, death was total, complete, and utterly final. Much to my surprise and joy, after my near-death experience the notion of the continuation of consciousness became an unshakable reality.” Often called as a healer to the bedside of the dying, Hawkes has learned that: “The closer death comes, the more the universal experience of being welcomed to the other side increases.”

 

Joyce Whiteley Hawkes, Cell-Level Healing (2006), 8-9, 142.

See also Joyce Hawkes, “Biophysicist discovers new life after death,” Nov. 15, 2013, 16 minutes, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyaBeHeRK6M.

Self-organization, knowledge, life, and ethics

Physicist Fritjof Capra writes: “The central concept of the new theory is that of self-organization. A living system is defined as a self-organizing system, which means that its order is not imposed by the environment but is established by the system itself. In other words, self-organizing systems exhibit a certain degree of autonomy. This does not mean that living systems are isolated from their environment; on the contrary, they interact with it continually, but this interaction does not determine their organization.

“An important aspect of the theory is the fact that the description of the pattern of self-organization does not use any physical parameters, such as energy or entropy, nor does it use the concepts of space and time. It is an abstract mathematical description of a pattern of relationships. This pattern can be realized in space and time in different physical structures, which are then described in terms of the concepts of physics and chemistry. But such a description alone will fail to capture the biological phenomenon of self-organization. In other words, physics and chemistry are not enough to understand life; we also need to understand the pattern of self-organization, which is independent of physical and chemical parameters.

“The organizing activity of living, self-organizing systems, finally, is cognition, or mental activity. Mental process is defined as the organizing activity of life. This means that all interactions of a living system with its environment are cognitive, or mental interactions. With this new concept of mind, life and cognition become inseparably connected. Mind, or more accurately, mental process is seen as being immanent in matter at all levels of life.

 “A further reason why I find the theory of self-organizing systems so important is that it seems to provide the ideal scientific framework for an ecologically oriented ethics. Such a system of ethics is urgently needed, since most of what scientists are doing today is not life-furthering and life-preserving but life-destroying. With physicists designing nuclear weapons that threaten to wipe out all life on the planet, with chemists contaminating our environment, with biologists releasing new and unknown types of microorganisms into the environment without really knowing what the consequences are, with psychologists and other scientists torturing animals in the name of scientific progress, with all these activities occurring, it seems that it is most urgent to introduce ethical standards into modern science.

“It is generally not recognized in our culture that values are not peripheral to science and technology but constitute their very basis and driving force. During the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century, values were separated from facts, and since that time we have tended to believe that scientific facts are independent of what we do and, therefore, independent of our values. In reality, scientific facts emerge out of an entire constellation of human perceptions, values, and actions—in a word, out of a paradigm—from which they cannot be separated. Although much of the detailed research may not depend explicitly on the scientist’s value system, the larger paradigm within which this research is pursued will never be value-free. Scientists, therefore, are responsible for their research not only intellectually but also morally.

“One of the most important insights of the new systems theory of life is that life and cognition are inseparable. The process of knowledge is also the process of self-organization, that is, the process of life. The conventional model of knowledge is one of a representation or an image of independently existing facts, which is the model derived from classical physics. From the new systems point of view, knowledge is part of the process of life, of a dialogue between object and subject.

“Knowledge and life then, are inseparable, and, therefore, facts are inseparable from values. Thus, the fundamental split that made it impossible to include ethical consideration in our scientific worldview has now been healed.”

Fritjof Capra, “Systems Theory and the New Paradigm” in Carolyn Merchant, editor, Ecology: Key Concepts in Critical Theory (Humanities Press, 1994), 334-341.

 

For a more recent and developed presentation of this argument for a new paradigm, see Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi, The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

The new systems paradigm is applied to jurisprudence in Fritjof Capra and Ugo Mattei, The Ecology of Law: Toward a Legal System in Tune with Nature and Community (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2015).

Dynamic relationships create heaven and earth

Affirming heaven requires new ways of understanding science and reality. Fritjof Capra's explanation of systems theory is a bridge to a more holistic understanding. He writes: “In science, the language of systems theory, and especially the theory of living systems, seems to provide the most appropriate formulation of the new ecological paradigm. Since living systems cover such a wide range of phenomena—individual organisms, social systems, and ecosystems—the theory provides a common framework and language for biology, psychology, medicine, economics, ecology, and many other sciences, a framework in which the so urgently needed ecological perspective is explicitly manifest.

“The conceptual framework of contemporary physics, and especially those aspects (suggesting a new metaphysics is needed), may be seen as a special case of the systems approach, dealing with nonliving systems and exploring the interface between nonliving and living systems. It is important to recognize, I believe, that in the new paradigm physics is no longer the model and source of metaphors for the other sciences. Even though the paradigm shift in physics is still of special interest, since it was the first to occur in modern science, physics has now lost its role as the science providing the most fundamental description of reality.

“I would now like to specify what I mean by the systems approach. To do so, I shall identify five criteria of systems thinking that, I claim, hold for all the sciences—the natural sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences. I shall formulate each criterion in terms of the shift from the old to the new paradigm, and I will illustrate the five criteria with examples from contemporary physics. However, since the criteria hold for all the sciences, I could equally well illustrate them with examples from biology, psychology, or economics.

“1. Shift from the part to the whole. In the old paradigm, it is believed that in any complex system the dynamics of the whole can be understood from the properties of the parts. The parts themselves cannot be analyzed any further, except by reducing them to still smaller parts. Indeed, physics has been progressing in that way, and at each step there has been a level of fundamental constituents that could not be analyzed any further.

“In the new paradigm, the relationship between the parts and the whole is reversed. The properties of the parts can be understood only from the dynamics of the whole. In fact, ultimately there are no parts at all. What we call a part is merely a pattern in an inseparable web of relationships. The shift from the part to the whole was the central aspect of the conceptual revolution of quantum physics in the 1920s.

“2. Shift from structure to process. In the old paradigm, there are fundamental structures, and then there are forces and mechanisms through which these interact, thus giving rise to processes. In the new paradigm, every structure is seen as the manifestation of an underlying process. The entire web of relationships is intrinsically dynamic. The shift from structure to process is evident, for example, when we remember that mass in contemporary physics is no longer seen as measuring the fundamental substance but rather as a form of energy, that is, as measuring activity or processes.

“3. Shift from objective to ‘epistemic’ science. In the old paradigm, scientific descriptions are believed to be objective, that is, independent of the human observer and the process of knowing. In the new paradigm, it is believed that epistemology—the understanding of the process of knowledge—has to be included explicitly in the description of natural phenomena. This recognition entered into physics with Heisenberg and is closely related to the view of physical reality as a web of relationships. Whenever we isolate a pattern in this network and define it as a part, or an object, we do so by cutting through some of its connections to the rest of the network, and this may be done in different ways. As Heisenberg put it, ‘What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.’

“4. Shift from ‘building’ to ‘network’ as metaphor of knowledge. The metaphor of knowledge as a building has been used in Western science and philosophy for thousands of years. There are fundamental laws, fundamental principles, basic building blocks, and so on. The edifice of science must be built on firm foundations.

“In the new paradigm, the metaphor of knowledge as a building is being replaced by that of a network. Since we perceive reality as a network of relationships, our descriptions, too, form an interconnected network of concepts and models in which there are no foundations. Things exist by virtue of their mutually consistent relationships, and all of physics has to follow uniquely from the requirement that its components be consistent with one another and with themselves.

“Since there are no foundations in the network, the phenomena described by physics are not any more fundamental than those described, for example, by biology or psychology. They belong to different systems levels, but none of those levels is any more fundamental than the others.

“5. Shift from truth to approximate descriptions. Scientists do not deal with truth in the sense of a precise correspondence between the description and the described phenomena. They deal with limited and approximate descriptions of reality. Heisenberg wrote in Physics and Philosophy, ‘The often discussed lesson that has been learned from modern physics (is) that every word or concept, clear as it may seem to be, has only a limited range of applicability.’

 

Fritjof Capra, “Systems Theory and the New Paradigm” in Carolyn Merchant, editor, Ecology: Key Concepts in Critical Theory (Humanities Press, 1994), 334-341.

A holistic or ecological worldview of reality

This is an excellent summary of a new scientific paradigm and a challenging new social worldview that is gaining acceptance in the twenty-first century. Even as there was nothing inevitable about the mechanistic paradigm of science, there is nothing inevitable about the survival and contribution to the evolution of human civilization of this new paradigm. It makes sense to me, however, and informs my writings about ethics and consciousness, as well as my self-understanding and interpretation of near-death experiences. So I am sharing it on this blog.

Physicist Fritjof Capra writes: “What we are seeing today is a shift of paradigms not only within science but also in the larger social arena. To analyze that cultural transformation, I have generalized Kuhn’s account of a scientific paradigm to that of a social paradigm, which I define as ‘a constellation of concepts, values, perceptions, and practices shared by a community, which form a particular vision of reality that is the basis of the way the community organizes itself.’

“The social paradigm now receding has dominated our culture for several hundred years, during which it has shaped our modern Western society and has significantly influenced the rest of the world. This paradigm consists of a number of ideas and values, among them the view of the universe as a mechanical system composed of elementary building blocks, the view of the human body as a machine, the view of life in a society as a competitive struggle for existence, the belief in unlimited material progress to be achieved through economic and technological growth and—last but not least—the belief that a society, in which the female is everywhere subsumed under the male, is one that follows from some basic law of nature. During recent decades all of these assumptions have been found severely limited and in need of radical revision.

“Indeed, such a revision is now taking place. The emerging new paradigm may be called a holistic, or an ecological, worldview, using the term ecological here in a much broader and deeper sense than it is commonly used. Ecological awareness, in that deep sense, recognizes the fundamental interdependence of all phenomena and the embeddedness of individuals and societies in the cyclical processes of nature.

“Ultimately, deep ecological awareness is spiritual or religious awareness. When the concept of the human spirit is understood as the mode of consciousness in which the individual feels connected to the cosmos as a whole, which is the root meaning of the word religion (from the Latin religare, meaning ‘to bind strongly’), it becomes clear that ecological awareness is spiritual in its deepest essence. It is, therefore, not surprising that the emerging new vision of reality, based on deep ecological awareness, is consistent with the ‘perennial philosophy’ of spiritual traditions, for example, that of Eastern spiritual traditions, the spirituality of Christian mystics, or with the philosophy and cosmology underlying the Native American traditions.

Fritjof Capra, “Systems Theory and the New Paradigm” in Carolyn Merchant, editor, Ecology: Key Concepts in Critical Theory (Humanities Press, 1994), 334-341.