By Deepak Chopra on May 20, 2013 in Science

By Deepak Chopra, M.D., P. Murali Doraiswamy, MBBS, Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D., Neil Theise, MD, Menas C. Kafatos, Ph.D.

We promised at the outset to explain the nature of reality by going to its very heart. To all appearances reality is dual. The objective world exists “out there” to be measured, but its existence is known only through subjective experience, which is “in here.” Both worlds need each other, and to be trapped in only one is unsatisfactory. The world turns into a dream only if you are conscious of your inner feelings, moods, sensations, and images. Yet if you rely only upon the physical world, you may wind up with meaningless data that don’t provide any link to what is truly important in everyday life. This point is easy enough to see, but joining the two worlds into wholeness isn’t easy.

Indeed, the task is so difficult that science proceeds as if it can exclude the mysterious, unreliable world “in here,” preferring measures of reality that can be reduced to quantifiable numbers. As a result, all of us have become used to balancing two versions of reality, and we do it almost without thinking. A summer day can be 90 degrees Fahrenheit, which is a fact, or it can be warm, which is a sensation. The two are not synonymous. “Warm” is a purely subjective statement, and it has no correlation to the thermometer. (After a subzero winter in Antarctica, 32 degrees F. feels warm, whereas compared to the inside of a volcano, 90 degrees F. is cool.)

Is there a way to join these two halves of reality? Most people aren’t concerned with such a question, but we posit that wholeness – seeing reality exactly for what it is – would set the human mind, and human life itself, free. The cosmos is a cold prison measured as meaningless data extracted from random events. To be human is to crave meaning, and yet intellectual honesty compels us not to accept easy answers. It is too easy, for example, to say that God created the universe, and since God loves us, the universe is our loving home. Such answers once sufficed, but four hundred years of scientific theories and data to back them up have swamped us. Overwhelmed by facts about the world “out there,” it is a struggle to give the world “in here” the validity it deserves.

Our trek to wholeness, as outlined in the first two posts, involves the quantum principle of complementarity, whose purpose is to make some of Nature’s seeming paradoxes compatible. (Please refer to the previous posts to see how this repair job on duality works.) Essentially, complementarity holds that opposites need each other – they cannot be complete in themselves without the other “half”. The classic example is the opposition of particle and wave, which look and act totally different but which are the inescapable reality of quanta. Complementarity is critical because it asserts that there is only one reality, and no matter how much it shifts its shape as we look from different perspectives, all the angles from which reality can be seen must ultimately fit together. This is comparable to all the tourist photos taken of the Grand Canyon. No matter how many there are, what time of day or night when they were taken, and irrespective of the million aspects of the canyon that were chosen, the whole collection of photos can’t depict different Grand Canyons – there is only one in the first place.

Unfortunately, things aren’t this simple when we substitute “reality” for “Grand Canyon,” because from the perspective of “in here” there is no proof that the external world exists independently of conscious awareness. At the same time, using only scientific data gathered “out there,” there is no proof of the subjective world, either. An MRI scan can show the brain centers for pain lighting up, yet if you ask someone “How much does your arthritis hurt today?” only their subjective report is valid. Even consciousness itself is only inferred by watching the brain light up. A brain scan is actually a very complicated version of those cartoons where a light bulb goes off when somebody, usually an egghead professor, has a bright idea. The light bulb can’t tell you what the bright idea actually is, and neither can an MRI.

Thus in order to see reality as a whole, we have to ask something incredibly basic: Why did creation split into subject and object in the first place? They are so wildly incompatible that this split has dogged and troubled humankind for centuries. Couldn’t God or the multiverse or random chance have come up with something much simpler, a reality that holds together properly? It doesn’t seem all that much to ask.

The two worlds “in here” and “out there” are either split for a reason or it just happened that way. If it just happened that way, fine. Science will go on, and so will subjective experience, and the two will uneasily meet somewhere in the brain. But if “in here” and “out there” are split for a reason, that’s a new story. There have been many versions of the story so far. In many cultures, there was once a Golden Age that was innocent, pure, and untroubled (in other words, whole) while now we live in a fallen age, and our separation from God or the gods has resulted in a fragmented world. Good is forced to come to terms with its opposite, evil, and therefore a reality of light and darkness envelops us. Needless, to say, such a story has not been satisfactory in a rational, scientific age. It persists as myth and religion, which billions of people still prefer to science.

We come closer to a rational story via complementarity, because when complementarity holds that opposites have a hidden unity at the limit of observation (revealed through mathematics), a complete view of quantum physics is satisfied. An opposite pair light wave and particle arise from the same source, and even if this source is beyond the five senses, lying in some invisible virtual domain, quantum mechanics can link the opposites and thus make every measurement turn out right. By extension, can we say the same about “in here” and “out there”? Do they spring from a common source?

Our answer is yes, and we point to the only source that could unite them, which is consciousness. The universal model for any experience needs three parts, commonly called the observer, the observed, and the process of observation. “Newton saw an apple” fits this model, as does “the collapse of the wave function produces a particle.” In the first case, the observer is named – Newton. In the second, the observer is implied. A great many physicists would balk, however, claiming that the collapse of the wave function doesn’t need an observer. It can happen even with automated experiments that carry out observations of the quantum system. It’s an objective event that occurs trillions of times throughout the cosmos, like countless other events (colliding hydrogen atoms, exploding stars, protons getting sucked into black holes) that came along before observers ever existed.

But this argument, which seems so commonsensical, is fallacious. The principle of complementarity tells us that “in here” and “out there” aren’t just compatible; they are necessary to each other, intertwined aspects of the whole. You can’t have one without the other. Grasping this fact is hard. Classical Western science, from the ancient Greeks through Newton and beyond, was based on atoms, molecules, and other physical “stuff” that exists on its own. But just as there cannot be particles without waves; “out there” needs consciousness, “in here.” This is a participatory universe, and leaving the participant out cannot be valid. In a fundamental sense, the universe is human, because we aren’t just isolated observers like kids pressing their noses to the window of a bakery shop. The three-part model needs all three parts: observer, observed, and process of observation.

Stay tuned for Part 4!

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Deepak Chopra, MD is the author of more than 70 books with twenty-one New York Times bestsellers, including co-author with Sanjiv Chopra, MD of Brotherhood: Dharma, Destiny, and The American Dream, and co-author with Rudolph Tanzi of Super Brain: Unleashing the Explosive Power of Your Mind to Maximize Health, Happiness, and Spiritual Well-being (Harmony).  Chopra serves as Founder of The Chopra Foundation and host of Sages and Scientists Symposium – August 16-18, 2013 at La Costa Resort and Spa.

P. Murali Doraiswamy, MBBS, FRCP, Professor of Psychiatry, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina and a leading physician scientist in the area of mental health, cognitive neuroscience and mind-body medicine.

Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D., Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology at Harvard University, and Director of the Genetics and Aging Research Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), co-author with Deepak Chopra of Super Brain: Unleashing the Explosive Power of Your Mind to Maximize Health, Happiness, and Spiritual Well-being. (Harmony)

Neil Theise, MD, Professor, Pathology and Medicine, (Division of Digestive Diseases) and Director of the Liver and Stem Cell Research Laboratory,Beth Israel Medical Center — Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York.  www.neiltheise.com

Menas Kafatos, Ph.D., Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor in Computational Physics, Director of the Center of Excellence at Chapman University, co-author with Deepak Chopra of the forthcoming book, Who Made God and Other Cosmic Riddles. (Harmony)

Bashar: What future?

Q: About the new Aquarian Age and how it’s going to be different from the Age of Pisces.

B: Well, you already know that the idea is that you are creating peace and harmony. This is what we are calling the fourth density reality. It will be where synchronicity will be commonplace. Where you will become a little more rarefied, in that way – rely less and less upon physicality. You may eat less, you may sleep less. You may see the world around you as brighter, more colorful, more energetic, in that way. You will begin to see and hear things that are beyond your senses now, for you will expand the idea of what your senses are. You will travel to the stars.  There will be many things that will be representative of the idea of the new unity that you will create in fourth density reality that you are referring to as the so called Aquarian Age.

Q: What’s going to happen to people who can’t make it to the fourth density?

B: Then they will create and continue to create a parallel third density reality, but they will not reincarnate in your world.

Q: Why is this happening?

B: Why not?

Q: I don’t understand why people should be left behind.

B: It is their own choosing. They are not being left behind. It is their own choosing to experience certain ideas that they feel they need for their growth. No one is left behind, anywhere. For you are never really going anywhere. You are all right here and right now, living different ideas of what NOW means to you. It is only different, not better – that is a judgment. Do you follow me?

Q: I follow you but I don’t understand it.

B: Understand that for many thousands of years your civilization has chosen to explore the idea of forgetfulness, limitation, judgment. Now, the majority of your civilization at this time is beginning to open up to the possibility of integration, of remembering who you are, and creating this state of existence that represents that remembrance – what you call the world of peace and harmony that is your Aquarian Age.

But many individuals are here for different reasons, for their own reasons. Not all of them – although it is the vast majority that are – but not all of them are here to experience your particular world transformation. They are here to experience other types of endeavors, and so they will simply not be part and parcel of the definition of going into the Aquarian Age. It is not a loss, it is simply a definition of the path they have chosen at this time. They will experience that transformation somewhere else and “someone else.”

Q: I don’t understand why there is so much suffering and why we have to choose that kind of stuff right now.

B: Because you have chosen to experience limitation. The idea of suffering goes along with that definition. Simply, there is no need to create a more profound reason other than the fact that you can do it. Because you want to experience every single corner of what is possible in All That Is, and your society as a whole has chosen to experience to great, great degrees, the complete and total exploration of physical limitation and forgetfulness.

Understand something: it is a statement and a belief that you are strong enough to do so, that has allowed you choose and experience all that you have called suffering. But now you have experienced those ideas for many tens of thousands of years. You are now at the end of that cycle and that is why your civilization is beginning to get an understanding that it does not need to suffer any more – and that is why you are considering all these alternatives.

That should let you know that this transformational life is the life in which every single individual that is upon your planet at this time can, for him or herself, have the revelation and the realization that they do not need to suffer any more. If all the suffering that they have created has been their creation then that degree of control is what lets them know that they have the control to create no more suffering. Do you follow me?

Q: Hhmm.

B: It has been an experience, because you could experience it. Do not forget that it is only your ego that judges the idea. To the Higher Self, the Oversoul, every experience is a learning experience and is taken as a part of the spiritual growth.

Suffering, to the Higher Self, is not seen as intrinsically “bad.” It is seen as a choice, as an experience. Because the soul wants to experience all that it can of All That Is. Polarity, positive and negative, are parts of all existence.

So, in your strength you have chosen to have known that you are strong enough to have experienced tens of thousands of years of suffering. You are eternal anyway – what difference does it make, ultimately?

Q: Yes, what difference does it make. What is the point of it all?

B: The point is that you are the creator. You are the one looking for a purpose but recognize this: that idea of needing a specific purpose in that way, having a point to it all, is only a third density, Piscean point of view.

Understand the idea, that existence existed before the idea of purpose came along. That which existed before the idea of purpose came along, does not need a purpose to continue to exist. It exists simply because it can. And it will do what it wants to simply because

it can. The purpose of it all...

Q: It’s stupid.

B: If you choose to look at it as stupid, that is your choice. But understand that you can also look at it as: the purpose of it all, is to simply do, is to simply be, is to create, because you are a creator.

You can look at it as being stupid, or you can look at it as being an infinite creation of ecstasy... that is the whole point, to everything –

for you to create whatever point to it you want there to be, and experience it, simply because you can. Because you are the creator. That is the point. Creation creates.

Life is the only process necessary to create more life to live. Creation is eternal, you are only experiencing this idea of pointlessness because you are looking at this idea from within a linear time-frame. Once you allow yourself the recognition that all times are now, it will not seem pointless in that sense, because it will not seem that things drag on. You will view everything as being right now and view any possible reality as a choice you can have, right now.

So understand, everything is only one point. Only now. One eternal moment. And because you are the creator, in that way, you have the ability to view things as more than just now. And that is the point to this reality. To experience all the separation, limitation and forgetfulness that was possible in this particular modality to experience. Because you want to enrich the overall understanding of what All That Is, IS.

YOU, you, ALL of you, are all the different ways All That Is has of looking at itself, of realizing itself, of self-creating. That is the point, because creation is eternal and infinite. It is up to you whether you view the eternalness within ecstasy or within negativity.

Q: Well, why is it that it seems like there is no choice?

B: Because as we have said: the choice of choosing limitation is the choice of choosing that you forget you created it. That is why it seems that way – but that is the experience you wanted. Otherwise, if you did not forget that you created it, you would not be able to experience some of the limited viewpoints you have experienced on this planet.

The purpose was to experience limitation. If you cannot forget you are the creator, you cannot experience limitation.

But the idea – what you would call in your civilization a Catch 22, is that the choosing of that limitation brings with it a scenario that in your terms, makes it difficult to remember you created it.

Now you are remembering. These are the very beginnings, the awakenings, the birth of a new idea of your TOTAL mass consciousness. It is waking up and remembering that it created the idea to begin with.

Q: Isn’t it true that we get trapped in physicality?

B: Only in a sense. But you hold the key. You have always held the key. The trap is in forgetting that you held the key. Now you are remembering – so you are not trapped.

And to look at physical reality as a trap, is what makes it so. Physical reality is just as valid as any other level of existence, just as beautiful, just as creative. If you choose to look at physical reality as a trap, it is no wonder that many of you get caught and caught up, in victim-hood.

If you choose to view physical reality as one of the expressions of All That Is, in beauty and harmony and synchronistic vibration with everything else, then your physical reality will become Heaven on Earth. Do you follow me?

Q: Yes.

B: Thank you. Pleasant dreams.

Q: Thank you.

   Awakening is more than feeling strange as we transform into new. We find ourselves acting and reacting differently:

• Offensively loving all - loving our Creator, loving others, loving ourselves– loving.
• Forbearing in the face of an insult and forgiving / pardoning to the point of erasing the evil suffered.
• Seeking peace with all - complete absence of anger.
• Naturally acting more patient - never hurrying - live today moment to moment.
• Speaking only positive, loving and kind words – truthfulness in all speech and actions.
• Avoiding complaining as nothing is good or bad – rather everything is perfect and as it should be.
• Observantly meeting the needs of other first - unbridled generosity
• Humble, a servant of all. Surrendered to the will of the Creator.
• Engaging in a simple lifestyle- no personal desire for fame or wealth.
• We find we don’t care what happens – knowing …everything is the plan of the Creator.
• No worrying or being anxious for anything as we are content with the creator’s provision. Fearless.
• No desire to control others, - .bending our will – letting everyone else have their way.
• Unbounded joy – smile and laugh more than you do anything else.
• Thankfulness / Gratitude - Say Thank You more than you say anything at all
• Understanding that no one is foolish or wise - everyone is a creation of the Creator and they are exactly where they should be in their development - therefore, we avoid all judgment, comparison or criticism of our Creator’s creation.
• Coming to enjoy the quiet of meditation and being close to a natural environment.
• Desiring to live a separated life of holiness and purity unto the creator.
• Acting as an open vessel of prophetic utterance and miracles from the creator.
• Becoming infinite consciousness and awareness without identity……..

Oh, how I wish I had ALL of these symptoms…

12-21-2012 – Everything changes….

Dim lights

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