“The intellect makes a mistake. It confuses reality with the experience of reality.” ~ Deepak Chopra
Deepak Chopra explains how everything in the universe is an activity and he guides us to know ourselves as the infinite. Read this overview of the video Self Realization is the Highest Healing. Text quoted from the video is italicized. For more details about Deepak Chopra teachings, books, videos and work see his Teacher’s Page..
Deepak Chopra dives directly into the depth of human reality…. and human misperception. He talks about the difference between our experience of reality and Reality.
“The intellect makes a mistake. It confuses reality with the experience of reality….Reality is eternal, timeless…you can’t catch it, can’t catch the past, the future or even the present. As soon as you have an experience, it’s over.”
Chopra explores memory as karma. Most experiences pass quickly because they didn’t have an impact, particularly an emotionally significant impact…
“We only remember what is significant… memory is very fickle, it’s not who we are” In Vedanta, the seeds of memory are called Karma and the seeds of memory karma are called samskara which “creates circle desires that take our soul through a cosmic journey until enlightenment.”
Next, Chopra turns to the body, the brain and time…
“Body is process that you can’t identify with your body or mind.”
“At a more fundamental level, it is energy and information. Your gene expression is influenced by emotions, thoughts, relationships, social interactions, your environment….he whole science of epi-genetics which is over taking genetics. You can change the nuero-networks of your brain to optimize physical, emotional and spiritual well being … new science of neuroplasticity.”
“You can change your relationship to time. Time is how we measure experience.” We often say, “I’m so busy, I don’t have any time.” This is an unhealthy mind state according to Chopra…
“When you say you are running out of time, this is the most dangerous internal dialogue; this shows the quality of your awareness. Your biological clock speeds up, your body gets inflamed… you get sick… you have run our of time.”
Central to this argument is that your experience of you is not in time… “The experience of you as consciousness is not in time, as a conscious being is not in time.”
When you remember your childhood for example, you refer to yourself as an “I” that had an experience many years go. But “I” is timeless….
“’I’ is that which knows and remembers the experience. All experience occurs and disappears in ‘I’, so only ‘I’ remains.”
Everything you experience is karma. The past created the experience of today, but what you do now, is up to you. Some say that Karma is deterministic—this is only partially true says Chopra. Karma (past decisions and actions) have led you to where you are now, but what you do with the current circumstance is entirely up to you.
Free will is dependent upon, or perhaps more accurately, requires an awake consciousness. “If you are asleep, there is no freewill. If you are awake there is infinite free will. Its all up to how aware we are.”
Chopra asks, “What does change your relationship to time mean? Its means to be present. While listening to this talk, be aware of that which is listening. That which is listening is a presence that is not in time.”
This presence you experience is the same presence that existed when you were a baby, a teenager, a parent. Its the same presence you experience today, tomorrow, always….“Experience will keep transforming but the presence in which the experiencing is happening is always the same.”
Chopra turns to the ultimate goal….
“Self realization is the ultimate goal of what is called enlightenment. It means you realize who you are….You aren’t the experience, you are that in which every experience arises and subsidies in every now. Now is the ticket to timeless being which means eternity. In that sense ‘I’ is immortal. The ‘I ‘which is not in time.”
Ironically even though we seem to have an intimate familiarity with “I” (I sleep, I go to the movies, I work, I don’t like spinach), we don’t really know what “I” actually is.
“That’s why Who am I? is the most important question of existence. Our sense of where we are at any given moment is a programmed experience. Where am I….. I is not in your body. Your body is an experience in I. What is the experience sensations, images, feelings, perceptions. These are modified forms of I.”
“ ‘I’ modifies itself into a thought, emotion, perception. There is only ‘I’ modifying itself into the experience of body, mind and universe. ‘I’ modifies itself in to the experience which we call me and other. Me refers to the body mind. Other is the other body mind or whatever the other is.”
“We may each have slightly different experience because of karma, which is the conditioned mind through which the movie is being projected.”
Chopra says that everyday reality is a hallucination. For some there is tremendous suffering in this hallucination, for others its heaven. “The key is self realization.”
You can’t take a hungry, poor person and get them to self realize, because they are struggling with basic need….
“You can’t take someone to this place of awareness until they have … fulfilled certain needs: survival and safety needs of the body-mind, then money, achievement and goals; many are struggling with relationships and love… then once those needs are met, the awakening of creative expression occurs, and intuition, then comes the awakening of higher consciousness, the ultimate awakening that we call God or Spirit or Self. They are all the same thing. Self of the individual is the self of the universe. But we don’t mean body-mind when we refer to the self of the individual. Body-mind is a transient experience.”
Where does the soul fit into all this? What is the soul? Chopra answers….
“The soul is the part of cosmic consciousness that is a journey through cosmic time for ultimate self realization…Self realization is the highest intelligence.”
Many things interfere with the journey toward self realization. Karmic traces from our conditioned minds create events, situations, circumstances that hinder us. We navigate through them until we are finished with these interferences, then we can enter the final part of the journey.
In the second second part of the video Chopra turns to Gallup’s five requirements of well being… Chopra explains them in detail, the brief list is here…
- Career and purpose well-being (job, career, and purpose are in alignment)
- Social well-being. Social connections, friends, family, bonding are most important for health and longevity.
- Financial well being.
- Physical well being
- Community and spiritual involvement.
Chopra turns lastly to the Happiness Formula (watch the video to find out about the Happines Formula) and explores a few of the many techniques that support waking up, including mindfulness, meditation, yoga mind-body practices, and techniques to monitor and manage emotions. All of these techniques require an observing awareness clothed in compassion.
Krishnamurti best sums this up: “The highest intelligence is the ability to observe yourself with out judging yourself.”
Be sure to watch Self Realization is the Highest Healing if you want the full impact of this powerfully informative talk by Deepak Chopra.
The video is sourced from The Chopra Well YouTube Channel.
Images (edited, text and logos added): Featured and 1) Sunset and 3) Clouds 4) Portrait 5) Sunset cat 6) Surreal table, all by Dimitris Vetsikas; Image 2) Winter Sun by MartinWinkler; all images are CC0 Public Domain.
