Dr
Deepak Chopra is an India-born, US-trained medical doctor. An
endocrinologist by specialty, he is a former chief of staff of
New England Memorial Hospital. But Chopra, a long-time Transcendental
Meditator, is also a practitioner of the ancient Indian system
of healing, Ayurveda, and is currently the Chief of Staff of
the Maharishi Ayurveda Health Center in Lancaster, Massachusetts.
In
his 'spare' time, Chopra is a best-selling author - five well-received
books written in the past five years. His latest, Unconditional
Life, has stimulated great public interest. He is also a much
sought-after lecturer. In the last year, Dr Chopra has been invited
to speak at several prestigious medical establishments, including
Harvard Medical School in the US, to say nothing of the myriad
New Age fairs at which he is a featured guest. In his books and
lectures, Chopra draws on not only the latest findings of Western
medical science, and the ancient truths of Ayurveda, but also
the esoteric area of quantum physics to explore the increasingly
acceptable field of Body-Mind-Spirit Medicine.
SI:
A basic theme of your books and public talks is that spiritual
awareness - a person coming into the knowledge of who they
are - is one of the keys to the healing process. Could you
discuss that a bit?
Dr
Deepak Chopra: Spiritual awareness is not only one of the keys
to the healing process. Spiritual awareness is the only way that
healing can occur. If I may take the risk of defining what a
spiritual experience is, it is one in which pure awareness reveals
itself to you as the maker of reality - where you suddenly discover
through insight or meditation or a freak accident that your essential
nature is spiritual, non-material.
SI:
Are there ways to help foster this spiritual awareness?
DC:
By teaching a person the ability to have a quiet mind, to stand
back and witness the whole thought process. With that ability
comes a major insight: I am the thinker and not the thought.
That insight, at a deep level of awareness, is enough to cause
a change in one's consciousness, and a spontaneous change in
one's biology.
SI:
When a patient comes to you from a traditional medical perspective,
identifying themselves with the body, or the emotions, or the
mind, which most of us do, how do you help them go beyond that?
DC:
It's possible these days to talk in medical terminology and convince
people that the shelf life of molecules is very short. Ninety-eight
percent of all the atoms in my body are gone by next year. The
physical body that I'm using to speak with you right now is not
the one I had last year. If I identify myself as my body, then
I certainly have a dilemma. Which one am I talking about? The
shelf life of emotions is a little longer. But if I identify
myself with my emotions, again I have a dilemma. Which one am
I talking about? The shelf life of my psychological make-up is
even longer. But that is changing all the time, hopefully in
an evolutionary direction. But I'm none of those things because
it is obvious that I am outliving those things. That I am not
my experiences is very obvious. I am the one who is having those
experiences.
Spirituality
has nothing to do with experience. It is to discover the timeless
factor in every experience, which is 'the experiencer'. My attention
is usually on a particular experience, but how about the one
who is having those experiences, the silent witness who is going
through all this? There is a poem from T.S. Eliot, "We shall
not cease from exploration. The end of our exploring will be
to arrive where we started from and know the place for the first
time."
SI:
You talk as someone who has experienced this.
DC:
I hope so. We go through these dilemmas where we wonder: am I
just intellectually enamoured of the whole concept? Because,
if I am, then obviously I am deluding myself. Or am I experientially
grounded in it? I think all of us to some extent have had the
experience of that silent witness. When we were children, there
was a silent part of us watching the child. When we were adolescents,
there was that same witness watching the adolescent. Middle age,
and so on. Every one, now and again, has discovered the self,
the one who is watching. There are periods in life when it is
very intense. There are periods in life where it is not, when
you get caught up in the whole field of relativity and lose your
moorings with the absolute.
SI:
Was there one particular experience that helped you realize
this awareness of the self, or is it there sometimes, and sometimes
not?
DC:
It's always there. But sometimes it is not so dominant in the
awareness. Basically it has to do with the quality of your attention.
SI:
It reminds me of something you said in one of your books. You
mention Krishnamurti talking about the process of self-observation.
DC:
Krishnamurti's term, "self-observation", is good. I'd like to
refer to it as awareness. Observation still implies (although
I don't think Krishnamurti meant it that way) a kind of observing
from a sensory level, whereas awareness is non-sensory, an awareness
of the self.
SI:
Have you had success in presenting this information to traditional
medical audiences?
DC:
I'm finding myself very comfortable talking to medical audiences,
and proving to them that underlying the material fields of the
universe are force fields. But they are not just force fields.
They are not just gravity, strong and weak interactions, or electromagnetism.
Every force field is simultaneously a field of information because
even physics now acknowledges that an atom is not only a hierarchy
of different states of energy, or different states of force fields.
An atom is a hierarchy of different states of information that
define the statistical likelihood of finding a particle here
or there at the time of observation. Einstein said that a field
is not really an actual model for space-time events, but the "continuum
of probability distributions of possible measurements as a function
of time."
In
other words, the field (which is what spirit is, a field of pure
potentiality) is a continuum of all possible energy and information
states that will subsequently manifest themselves as space-time
events. Matter is a space-time event. You and I in physical bodies
are space-time events. We confuse ourselves with these space-time
events, when in fact we are the ones who generate these space-time
events. Somewhere inside us we know that we outlive these expressions
of space-time experience. To be grounded experientially in the
knowledge of immortality is to lose fear once and for all, to
understand that the flow of linear time is a psychological event,
that we do not exist in time, but that eternity exists in us.
This awareness gives us freedom from both the memories of the
past and anticipation of the future. We experience ourselves
as the field, the eternal possibility, the immeasurable potential
of all that was, is, and will be.
There
is a nice poem from Rumi, "Out beyond ideas of right doing and
wrong doing there is a field. I'll meet you there." To know oneself
as the field has become a spiritual quest, but also a scientific
quest these days. All our technology today - whether we use fax
machines or computers or speak on phones or watch programs on
television - is based on the premise that the essential nature
of the material world is non-material. All of these technologies
are based on the overthrow of the superstition of materialism
in the world of technology.
The
next step is to realize that these so-called fields of force,
or information, are actually fields of intelligence and knowledge.
Because when information is self-referring, in that it has a
feedback loop that influences its own expression, then you cannot
just call it pure information. Everybody understands information
in today's information age. But the next step in the evolution
of this knowledge is to understand that it is not just information,
it is intelligence, it is knowledge, it is consciousness. The
force fields of nature are force fields of consciousness. They
are force fields of knowledge. They are fields of Brahman.
SI:
Any final comments?
DC:
There is a Vedic saying, "All your life you've paid attention
to your experiences, but never to yourself." Pay attention to
your self outside the realm of your experiences and you'll discover
that there is a light there, there is a love there. Love of one,
love of all, merge into love, pure and simple. It radiates from
you like light from the sun. This love is not sentiment, but
the truth at the heart of all creation. It can solve not only
our own problems, but the problems of humanity.
Reprinted
with the kind permission of Share International Magazine.
| Authors
Details:
Monte
Leach
Monte
Leach is a freelance radio journalist, based in San Francisco
and the US editor of
Share International. |
|
