God as consciousness is the creative source of all

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).

All that is natural and supernatural is miraculous

Physician Deepak Chopra writes: “Ever since the Big Bang, the energy in the universe has been dissipating, like a hot stove cooling off. This dispersal of heat, known as entropy, is inexorable. Yet somehow islands of ‘negative entropy’ have evolved. One of them is life on earth. Instead of dissipating into the void of outer space, the sunlight that hits green plants begins the chain of life, holding on to energy and converting it into incredibly complex forms that hand the energy around, recycle it, and use it in creative ways. It is impossible for random events to explain how entropy could be defied for billions of years.

“DNA was born in a hostile environment filled with extreme heat and cold, toxic gases, and a firestorm of random chemical reactions. Unlike any chemical in the known universe, DNA resisted being degraded into smaller molecules; instead it built itself up into higher complexity and learned to replicate itself. No explanation for this unique activity has been offered.

“All the cells in our bodies, trillions of them, contain the same DNA, yet they spontaneously ‘know’ how to become liver cells, heart cells, and all other specialized cells. In the embryonic brain, stem cells travel along precise paths, stop when they reach their destinations, and become specific neurons for seeing, hearing, controlling hormones, and thinking. This spontaneous ability to ‘know’ how to suppress one part of the genetic code while enlivening others is inexplicable.

“DNA can tell time. From the moment an ovum gets fertilized, a single cell contains time-sensitive triggers for growing baby teeth, entering puberty, causing menopause, and eventually dying. How these sequences, which span seven decades or more, can be contained inside a chemical is beyond explanation.

“In an uncanny way, molecules ‘know’ what they are doing, whether in the ancestral chemical soup from which DNA emerged or in the chemistry of your brain cells as you read this sentence.

“One of the everyday mysteries that medicine can’t explain is controlled by the host. Every minute you and I inhale millions of microbes, viruses, allergens, and toxic substances. The vast majority reside in us harmlessly. Our bodies control them from harming us. But when AIDS destroys the immune system, the host loses control, and rampant disease breaks out in an autoimmune disorder like rheumatoid arthritis. The system for protecting the body turns upon it instead. Even an innocuous condition like hay fever indicates that control by the host has failed. In all these examples, the breakdown is a breakdown of intelligence. Thus mind is pervasive in every cell and swims invisibly through the bloodstream.

“The reason that mixing mind with matter disturbs mainstream doctors, who are trained to be scientific, isn’t a secret. Mind rules the subjective world, which science distrusts, while matter is the basis of ‘real’ knowledge. Heart patients feel all kinds of pain, pressure, and strangeness about their condition; an angiogram tells the doctor what’s really going on.

“Mind holds some kind of key to the ultimate nature of reality. Once you admit that this is true, the possibility of miraculous events increases, because the non-miraculous has shifted so much. Natural and supernatural are infused with the same properties of consciousness.

“Nothing is real for us outside our experience of it, and experience is a conscious creative act. Without me, an observer, there is no proof that the stars exist. This is why Heisenberg declared consciousness is something science cannot get behind, or go beyond. We only know that we are here observing the world. What happens when nobody observes it is a mystery.

“Are miracles all in your mind? Yes. Is the everyday world all in your mind? Yes again.

“Every experience we have, mental or physical, is a miracle, because we have no way of explaining experience scientifically. We assume that photons give us the experience of form and color, yet photons are formless and colorless. We assume that the vibration of air creates sound, but vibrations are silent outside the brain. We study the receptor sites on the tongue and inside the nose, which gives rise to taste and smell, yet what takes place at those sites is chemical reactions, not an experience.

“Materialism, in its conquest of the spiritual worldview, has burdened us with explanations requiring just as much faith as believing in miracles. Faith alone supports the notion that sodium and potassium ions passing through the outer membrane of neurons, in turn setting up electrochemical reactions that span millions of neural networks, create sensations, images, feelings, and thoughts. These are assumptions with no explanation whatsoever. Chemicals are just names we have applied to a mystery. Brain scans are snapshots of activity, telling us nothing about actual experience, just as snapshots of piano keys tell us nothing about enjoying music.

“Only consciousness makes experience possible; therefore, as the source of consciousness, God exists outside the domain of data.

“The founder of quantum physics, Max Planck, had no doubt that mind would eventually become the elephant in the room, an issue too massive and obvious to ignore: ‘I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.’”

Deepak Chopra, The Future of God: A Practical Approach to Spirituality for Our Times (Harmony Books, 2014), 93-147.

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).