An interview with Dr. Deepak Chopra about the key role of
spiritual awareness in the healing process.
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 free young teen sex
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 young sex pics
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 teen xxx pussy pictures
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 school teenage porn
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 teen schoolgirls fucking
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.
