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Point 1:
The body’s wisdom is a good entry point into the hidden dimensions of life, because although completely invisible, the body’s wisdom is undeniably real—a fact that medical researchers began to accept in the mid-1980s. The former view was that the brain’s capacity for intelligence was unique. But then signs of intelligence began to be discovered in the immune system, and then in the digestive system. In both these
systems, special messenger molecules could be observed circulating through every organ, bringing information to and from the brain, but also functioning on their own. A white cell that can distinguish between invading enemy bacteria and harmless pollen is making an intelligent decision, even though it floats in the bloodstream apart from the brain.
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Point 2:
Ten years ago, it would have seemed absurd to speak of intestines being intelligent. The lining of the digestive tract was known to possess thousands of nerve endings, but these were just remote outposts of the nervous system—a way for it to keep in touch with the lowly business of extracting nutrition from food. Now it turns out that the intestines are not so lowly after all. Their scattered nerve cells form a finely tuned system for reacting to outside events—an upsetting remark at work, the threat of danger, a death in the family. The stomach’s reactions are just as reliable as the brain’s thoughts, and just as intricate. Your colon, your liver, and your stomach cells alsothink, only not in the brain’s verbal language. What people
had been calling a “gut reaction” turned out to be a mere hint of the complex intelligence at work in a hundred thousand billion cells.
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Point 3:
Although every cell has a set of unique functions (liver cells, for example, can perform fifty separate tasks), these combine in creative ways. A person can digest food never eaten before, think thoughts never thought before, dance in a way never seen before. Clinging to old behavior is not an option.
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Point 4:
Why we need to sleep remains a medical mystery, yet complete dysfunction
develops if we don’t enjoy its benefits. In the silence of inactivity, the future of the body is incubating.
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Point 5:
The fifty functions that a liver cell performs are totally unique, not overlapping with the tasks of muscle,kidney, heart, or brain cells—yet it would be catastrophic if even one function were compromised.
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Point 6:
Any neurologist will assure you that the brain offers no proof that the outside world really exists and many hints that it doesn’t.
All the brain does, in fact, is to receive continuous signals about the body’s state of chemical balance,temperature, and oxygen consumption, along with a crackling stream of nerve impulses. This mass of raw data starts out as chemical bursts with attached electrical charges. These blips run up and down a tangled web of spidery nerve cells, and once a signal reaches the brain, like a runner from the edge of the Empire bringing a message to Rome, the cortex assembles the raw data into even more complex arrangements of electrical and chemical blips.
The cortex doesn’t inform us about this never-ending data processing, which is all that is happening inside gray matter. Instead, the cortex tells us about the world—it allows us to perceive sights, sounds,tastes, smells, and textures—the whole array of creation. The brain has pulled an enormous trick on us, a remarkable sleight of hand, because there is no direct connection between the body’s raw data and our
subjective sense of an outside world.
For all anyone knows, the entire outside world could be a dream. When I’m in bed having a dream, I see a world of events just as vivid as the waking world (for most of us, the other four senses are scattered unevenly throughout our dreams, but some dreamers can touch, taste, hear, and smell as accurately as they can while awake). But when I open my eyes in the morning, I know that these vivid events were all produced inside my head. I’d never make the mistake of falling for this trick because I already assume that dreams aren’t real.
So does my brain dedicate one apparatus to making the dream world and another to the waking world? No, it doesn’t. In terms of cerebral function, the dream mechanism doesn’t flick off when I wake up. The same visual cortex in the rear of my skull allows me to see an object—a tree, a face, the sky—whether I am seeing it in memory, in a dream, in a photo, or standing before me. The locations of brain cell activity
shift slightly from one to the other, which is why I can distinguish among a dream, a photo, and the real thing, yet the same fundamental process is constantly taking place. I am manufacturing a tree, a face, or the sky from what is actually a random tangle of spidery nerves shooting bursts of chemicals and electrical charges in my brain and all around my body. No matter how hard I try, I will never find a single
pattern of chemicals and charges in the shape of a tree, a face, or any other shape. There is just a fire-storm of electrochemical activity.
This embarrassing problem—that there is no way to prove the existence of an outside
world—undermines the entire basis of materialism. Thus we arrive at the second spiritual secret:You are not in the world; the world is in you.
The only reason that rocks are solid is that the brain registers a flurry of electrical signals as touch; the only reason the sun shines is that the brain registers another flurry of electrical signals as sight. There is no sunlight in my brain, whose interior remains as dark as a limestone cavern no matter how bright it is outside.
Having said that the whole world is created in me, I immediately realize that you could say the same thing. Are you in my dream or am I in yours—or are we all trapped in some bizarre combination of each other’s personal version of events? To me, this isn’t a problem but the very heart of spirituality. Everyone is a creator. The mystery of how all these individual viewpoints somehow mesh, so that your world and
mine can harmonize, is the very thing that makes people seek spiritual answers. For there is no doubt that reality is full of conflict but also full of harmony. It is very liberating to realize that as creators we generate every aspect, good or bad, of our experience. In this way, each of us is the center of creation.
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Point 7:
Few Unexplained Facts
Desert birds living by the Grand Canyon bury thousands of pine nuts in widely scattered locations along the canyon rim. They retrieve this stored food during the winter, returning precisely to the nuts each one buried and finding them under a deep layer of snow.
Salmon born in a small stream that feeds the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest swim out to sea. After several years spent roaming vast distances of ocean, they return to spawn at the precise place where they were born, never winding up in the wrong stream.
Little children from several countries were read to in Japanese; afterward they were asked to pick whether they had just heard some nonsense words or a lovely Japanese poem. The children from Japan all got the answer right, but so did significantly more than half the children from other countries who had never listened to a word of Japanese in their lives.
Identical twins hundreds or thousands of miles apart have immediately sensed the moment when their sibling died in an accident.
Fireflies in Indonesia numbering in the millions are able to synchronize their flashes over an area of several square miles.
In Africa, certain trees that are being overforaged can signal other trees miles away to increase the tannin in their leaves, a chemical that makes them inedible to foraging animals. The distant trees receive the message and alter their chemistry accordingly.
Twins separated at birth have met for the first time years later, only to find that they’ve each married a woman with the same first name in the same year and now have the same number of children.
Mother albatrosses returning to a nesting site with food in their beaks immediately locate their chicks among hundreds of thousands of identical offspring on a crowded beach.
Once a year at the full moon several million horseshoe crabs emerge together on one beach to mate. They have answered the same call, from depths of the ocean where no light ever penetrates.
When air molecules cause your eardrum to quiver no differently from a cymbal being hit with a stick, you hear a voice that you recognize speaking words you understand.
On their own, sodium and chlorine are deadly poisons. When they combine as salt, they form the most basic chemical in support of life.
To read this sentence, several million neurons in your cerebral cortex had to form an
instantaneous pattern that is completely original and never appeared before in your life.
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Point 8:
Deepak Chopra Explains that there is concept of one reality
Example 1 : caterpillar turning into butterfly
what goes on invisibly inside the chrysalis remains deeply mysterious. The caterpillar’s organs and tissues dissolve into an amorphous, souplike state, only to reconstitute into the structure of a butterfly’s body that bears no resemblance to a caterpillar at all.
Science has no idea why metamorphosis evolved. It is almost impossible to imagine that insects hit on it by chance-the chemical complexity of turning into a butterfly is incredible; thousands of steps are all minutely interconnected. (It’s as if you dropped off a bicycle at the shop to be repaired, and when you came back the parts had become a Gulfstream jet.)
But we do have some idea about how this delicate chain of events is linked. Two hormones, one called juvenile hormone, the otherecdysone, regulate the process, which looks to the naked eye like a caterpillar dissolving into soup. These two hormones make sure that the cells moving from larva to butterfly know where they are going and how they are to change. Some cells are told to die; others digest themselves, while still others turn into eyes, antennae, and wings. This implies a fragile (and miraculous) rhythm that must remain in precise balance between creation and destruction. That rhythm, it turns out,depends on day length, which in turn depends on the earth’s rotation around the sun. Therefore, a cosmic rhythm has been intimately connected to the birth of butterflies for millions of years.
Science concentrates on the molecules, but this is a striking example of intelligence at work, using molecules as a vehicle for its own intent. The intent in this case was to create a new creature without wasting old ingredients. (And if there is only one reality, we can’t say, as science does, that day length causes the pupa’s hormones to begin the metamorphosis into a butterfly. Day length and hormones come from the same creative source, weaving one reality. That source uses cosmic rhythms or molecules as it sees fit. Day length doesn’t cause hormones to change any more than hormones cause the day to change—both are tied to a hidden intelligence that creates both at once. In a dream or a painting, a boy may hit a baseball, but his bat doesn’t cause the ball to fly through the air. The whole dream or painting fits together seamlessly.)
Example 2: How insects learned to fly
Two chemicals called actin andmyosin evolved eons ago to allow the muscles
in insect wings to contract and relax. Thus, insects learned to fly. When one of these paired molecules is absent, wings will grow but they cannot flap and are therefore useless. Today, the same two proteins are responsible for the beating of the human heart, and when one is absent, the person’s heartbeat is inefficient and weak, ultimately leading to heart failure.
Again, science marvels at the way molecules adapt over millions of years, but isn’t there a deeper intent? In our hearts, we feel the impulse to fly, to break free of boundaries. Isn’t that the same impulse nature expressed when insects began to take flight? The prolactin that generates milk in a mother’s breast is unchanged from the prolactin that sends salmon upstream to breed, enabling them to cross from saltwater
to fresh. The insulin in a cow is exactly the same as the insulin in an amoeba; both serve to metabolize carbohydrates, even though a cow is millions of times more complex than an amoeba.
To believe in one reality that is totally interconnected isn’t mystical at all, it turns out.
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Point 9:
One of the most spiritual figures in the twentieth century was asked how England should handle the threat of Nazism.
He replied:
I want you to fight Nazism without arms. I would like you to lay down the arms you have as being useless for saving you or humanity. You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions. Let them take possession of your beautiful island, with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these but neither your souls, nor your minds.
The author of this passage was Mahatma Gandhi, and needless to say his “open letter” to the British was greeted with shock and outrage. Yet Gandhi was being true to the principle ofAhimsa, or nonviolence.He successfully used passive nonviolence to persuade the British to grant freedom to India, so by refusing to go to war against Hitler—a stand he took throughout World War II—Gandhi was consistent in his
spiritual beliefs. Would Ahimsa really have worked to persuade Hitler, a man who declared that “war is the father of all things”? We will never know. Certainly passivity itself has a dark aspect. The Catholic Church marks as one of its darkest eras the years when it permitted millions of Jews to be killed under
Nazism, to the extent that Italian Jews were rounded up within sight of the Vatican windows.
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Point 10:
In 1971, students at Stanford University were asked to volunteer for an unusual experiment in role playing. One group of students was to pretend that they were prison guards in charge of another group who pretended to be prisoners. Although it was understood that this was make-believe, a jail setting was provided, and the two groups lived together for the duration of the experiment. According to plan,
everyone would play their roles for two weeks, but after only six days the prison experiment had to be terminated. The reason? The boys chosen for their mental health and moral values turned into sadistic,out-of-control guards on the one hand and depressed victims of exorbitant stress on the other.The professors conducting the experiment were shocked but couldn’t deny what had occurred.
The lead researcher, Philip Zimbardo, wrote: “My guards repeatedly stripped their prisoners naked, hooded them,chained them, denied them food or bedding privileges, put them into solitary confinement, and made them clean toilet bowls with their bare hands.” Those who didn’t descend to such atrocious behavior did nothing to stop the ones who did. (The parallel with infamous acts by American prison guards in Iraq in
2004 prompted Zimbardo to bring the Stanford experiment back to light after more than thirty years.) There was no extreme to which the student guards would not resort short of outright physical torture.Zimbardo mournfully recalls, “As the boredom of their job increased, they began using the prisoners as their playthings, devising ever more humiliating and degrading games for them to play. Over time, these
amusements took a sexual turn, such as having the prisoners simulate sodomy on each other. Once aware of such deviant behavior, I closed down the Stanford prison.”
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Deepak Chopra says Science is God explaining God through a human nervous system
Point 11:
When people argue that there is no scientific proof that the universe is conscious, my immediate response is, “I am conscious, and am I not an activity of the universe?” The brain, which operates on electromagnetic impulses, is as much an activity of the universe as are the electromagnetic storms in the atmosphere or on a distant star. Therefore, science is one form of electromagnetism that spends its time
studying another form. I like the remark that a physicist once made to me: “Science should never be considered the enemy of spirituality because science is its greatest ally. Science is God explaining God through a human nervous system. Isn’t spirituality the same thing?”
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Point 12:
Deepak Chopra says after seeing Apoptosis At Work No one can really remain a materialist
Phenomenon called apoptosis says “For every cell there is a time to live and a time to die.”
Apoptosis is programmed cell death, and although we don’t realize it, each of us has been dying every day, right on schedule, in order to remain alive. Cells die because they want to. The cell carefully reverses the birth process: It shrinks, it destroys its basic proteins, and then it goes on to dismantle its own DNA.Bubbles appear on the surface membrane as the cell opens its portals to the outside world and expels
every vital chemical, to finally be swallowed up by the body’s white cells exactly as they would devour an invading microbe. When the process is complete, the cell has dissolved and leaves no trace behind.
When we read this graphic account of a cell sacrificing itself so methodically, you can’t help being touched. Yet the mystical part is still to come. Apoptosis isn’t a way to get rid of sick or old cells, as you might suppose. The process gave us birth. As embryos in the womb, each of us passed through primitive stages of development when we had tadpole tails, fishlike gills, webbing between our fingers, and most
surprisingly, too many brain cells. Apoptosis took care of these unwanted vestiges—in the case of the brain, a newborn baby forms proper neural connections by removing the excess brain tissue that we were all born with. (It came as a surprise when neurologists discovered that our brains contain the most cells at
birth, a number which gets whittled down by the millions so that higher intelligence can forge its delicate web of connections. It was long thought that killing off brain cells was a pathological process associated with aging. Now the whole issue must be reconsidered.)
Apoptosis doesn’t end in the womb, however. Our bodies continue to thrive on death. The immune cells that engulf and consume invading bacteria would turn on the body’s own tissues if they didn’t induce death in each other and then turn on themselves with the same poisons used against invaders. Whenever any cell detects that its DNA is damaged or defective, it knows that the body will suffer if this defect is
passed on. Fortunately, every cell carries a poison gene known as p53 that can be activated to make itself die.
These few facts barely scratch the surface. Anatomists long ago knew that skin cells die every few days;that retinal cells, red blood cells, and stomach cells also are programmed with specific short life spans so that their tissues can be quickly replenished. Each dies for its own unique reason. Skin cells have to be
sloughed off so that our skin remains supple, while stomach cells die as part of the potent chemical combustion that digests food.
Death cannot be our enemy if we have depended upon it from the womb. Consider the following irony.As it turns out, the body is capable of taking a vacation from death by producing cells that decide to live forever. These cells don’t trigger p53 when they detect defects in their own DNA. And by refusing to issue their own death warrants, these cells divide relentlessly and invasively. Cancer, the most feared of
diseases, is the body’s vacation from death, while programmed death is its ticket to life. This is the paradox of life and death confronted head on. The mystical notion of dying every day turns out to be the body’s most concrete fact.
What this means is that we are exquisitely sensitive to the balance of positive and negative forces, and when the balance is tipped, death is the natural response. Nietzsche once remarked that humans are the only creatures who must be encouraged to stay alive. He couldn’t have known that this is literally true.Cells receive positive signals that tell them to stay alive—chemicals called growth factors. If these positive signals are withdrawn, the cell loses its will to live. Like the Mafia’s kiss of death, the cell can also be sent messengers that bind to its outer receptors to signal that death has arrived—these chemical messengers are actually known as “death activators.”
A Harvard Medical School professor had discovered an amazing fact. There is a substance that causes cancer cells to activate new blood vessels so that they
can get food. Medical research has focused on finding out how to block this unknown substance so that malignant growths can be deprived of nutrients and thus killed. The professor discovered that the exact opposite substance causes toxemia in pregnant women, a potentially fatal disorder in which the blood vessels are “unhappy” that they are undergoing normal programmed cell death. “You realize what this
means?” he said with deep awe. “The body can trigger chemicals in a balancing act between life and death, and yet science has totally ignored who is doing the balancing. Doesn’t the whole secret of health lie in that part of ourselves, not in the chemicals being used?” The fact that consciousness could be the missing ingredient, theX factor behind the scenes, came to him as a revelation.
Apoptosis rescues us from fear, I think. The death of a single cell makes no difference to the body.What counts is not the act but the plan—an overarching design that brings the balance of positive and negative signals that every cell responds to. The plan is beyond time because it dates to the very construction of time. The plan is beyond space because it is everywhere in the body and yet nowhere—every cell as it dies takes the plan with it, and yet the plan survives.
So after seeing Apoptosis At Work No one can really remain a materialist.
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Point 13:
When Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated by a religious fanatic on January 30, 1948, the killer claimed another victim. A thread. The traditional costume of the Brahmin caste included a double thread worn over the shoulder. There were many evils in the caste system, but in my mind the double thread symbolized a deep truth—that enlightenment was possible. Until modern times, everyone in India knew that the double thread was the promise of a second birth. It stood for a legacy going back before memory began. Today, enlightenment is no longer the goal of life, not even in India. The most that any teacher can do is to open the door again; he can answer three questions in the age-old way:
• Who am I?You are the totality of the universe acting through a human nervous system.
• Where did I come from?You came from a source that was never born and will never die.
• Why am I here?To create the world in every moment.
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Point 1:
The body’s wisdom is a good entry point into the hidden dimensions of life, because although completely invisible, the body’s wisdom is undeniably real—a fact that medical researchers began to accept in the mid-1980s. The former view was that the brain’s capacity for intelligence was unique. But then signs of intelligence began to be discovered in the immune system, and then in the digestive system. In both these
systems, special messenger molecules could be observed circulating through every organ, bringing information to and from the brain, but also functioning on their own. A white cell that can distinguish between invading enemy bacteria and harmless pollen is making an intelligent decision, even though it floats in the bloodstream apart from the brain.
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Point 2:
Ten years ago, it would have seemed absurd to speak of intestines being intelligent. The lining of the digestive tract was known to possess thousands of nerve endings, but these were just remote outposts of the nervous system—a way for it to keep in touch with the lowly business of extracting nutrition from food. Now it turns out that the intestines are not so lowly after all. Their scattered nerve cells form a finely tuned system for reacting to outside events—an upsetting remark at work, the threat of danger, a death in the family. The stomach’s reactions are just as reliable as the brain’s thoughts, and just as intricate. Your colon, your liver, and your stomach cells alsothink, only not in the brain’s verbal language. What people
had been calling a “gut reaction” turned out to be a mere hint of the complex intelligence at work in a hundred thousand billion cells.
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Point 3:
Although every cell has a set of unique functions (liver cells, for example, can perform fifty separate tasks), these combine in creative ways. A person can digest food never eaten before, think thoughts never thought before, dance in a way never seen before. Clinging to old behavior is not an option.
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Point 4:
Why we need to sleep remains a medical mystery, yet complete dysfunction
develops if we don’t enjoy its benefits. In the silence of inactivity, the future of the body is incubating.
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Point 5:
The fifty functions that a liver cell performs are totally unique, not overlapping with the tasks of muscle,kidney, heart, or brain cells—yet it would be catastrophic if even one function were compromised.
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Point 6:
Any neurologist will assure you that the brain offers no proof that the outside world really exists and many hints that it doesn’t.
All the brain does, in fact, is to receive continuous signals about the body’s state of chemical balance,temperature, and oxygen consumption, along with a crackling stream of nerve impulses. This mass of raw data starts out as chemical bursts with attached electrical charges. These blips run up and down a tangled web of spidery nerve cells, and once a signal reaches the brain, like a runner from the edge of the Empire bringing a message to Rome, the cortex assembles the raw data into even more complex arrangements of electrical and chemical blips.
The cortex doesn’t inform us about this never-ending data processing, which is all that is happening inside gray matter. Instead, the cortex tells us about the world—it allows us to perceive sights, sounds,tastes, smells, and textures—the whole array of creation. The brain has pulled an enormous trick on us, a remarkable sleight of hand, because there is no direct connection between the body’s raw data and our
subjective sense of an outside world.
For all anyone knows, the entire outside world could be a dream. When I’m in bed having a dream, I see a world of events just as vivid as the waking world (for most of us, the other four senses are scattered unevenly throughout our dreams, but some dreamers can touch, taste, hear, and smell as accurately as they can while awake). But when I open my eyes in the morning, I know that these vivid events were all produced inside my head. I’d never make the mistake of falling for this trick because I already assume that dreams aren’t real.
So does my brain dedicate one apparatus to making the dream world and another to the waking world? No, it doesn’t. In terms of cerebral function, the dream mechanism doesn’t flick off when I wake up. The same visual cortex in the rear of my skull allows me to see an object—a tree, a face, the sky—whether I am seeing it in memory, in a dream, in a photo, or standing before me. The locations of brain cell activity
shift slightly from one to the other, which is why I can distinguish among a dream, a photo, and the real thing, yet the same fundamental process is constantly taking place. I am manufacturing a tree, a face, or the sky from what is actually a random tangle of spidery nerves shooting bursts of chemicals and electrical charges in my brain and all around my body. No matter how hard I try, I will never find a single
pattern of chemicals and charges in the shape of a tree, a face, or any other shape. There is just a fire-storm of electrochemical activity.
This embarrassing problem—that there is no way to prove the existence of an outside
world—undermines the entire basis of materialism. Thus we arrive at the second spiritual secret:You are not in the world; the world is in you.
The only reason that rocks are solid is that the brain registers a flurry of electrical signals as touch; the only reason the sun shines is that the brain registers another flurry of electrical signals as sight. There is no sunlight in my brain, whose interior remains as dark as a limestone cavern no matter how bright it is outside.
Having said that the whole world is created in me, I immediately realize that you could say the same thing. Are you in my dream or am I in yours—or are we all trapped in some bizarre combination of each other’s personal version of events? To me, this isn’t a problem but the very heart of spirituality. Everyone is a creator. The mystery of how all these individual viewpoints somehow mesh, so that your world and
mine can harmonize, is the very thing that makes people seek spiritual answers. For there is no doubt that reality is full of conflict but also full of harmony. It is very liberating to realize that as creators we generate every aspect, good or bad, of our experience. In this way, each of us is the center of creation.
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Point 7:
Few Unexplained Facts
Desert birds living by the Grand Canyon bury thousands of pine nuts in widely scattered locations along the canyon rim. They retrieve this stored food during the winter, returning precisely to the nuts each one buried and finding them under a deep layer of snow.
Salmon born in a small stream that feeds the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest swim out to sea. After several years spent roaming vast distances of ocean, they return to spawn at the precise place where they were born, never winding up in the wrong stream.
Little children from several countries were read to in Japanese; afterward they were asked to pick whether they had just heard some nonsense words or a lovely Japanese poem. The children from Japan all got the answer right, but so did significantly more than half the children from other countries who had never listened to a word of Japanese in their lives.
Identical twins hundreds or thousands of miles apart have immediately sensed the moment when their sibling died in an accident.
Fireflies in Indonesia numbering in the millions are able to synchronize their flashes over an area of several square miles.
In Africa, certain trees that are being overforaged can signal other trees miles away to increase the tannin in their leaves, a chemical that makes them inedible to foraging animals. The distant trees receive the message and alter their chemistry accordingly.
Twins separated at birth have met for the first time years later, only to find that they’ve each married a woman with the same first name in the same year and now have the same number of children.
Mother albatrosses returning to a nesting site with food in their beaks immediately locate their chicks among hundreds of thousands of identical offspring on a crowded beach.
Once a year at the full moon several million horseshoe crabs emerge together on one beach to mate. They have answered the same call, from depths of the ocean where no light ever penetrates.
When air molecules cause your eardrum to quiver no differently from a cymbal being hit with a stick, you hear a voice that you recognize speaking words you understand.
On their own, sodium and chlorine are deadly poisons. When they combine as salt, they form the most basic chemical in support of life.
To read this sentence, several million neurons in your cerebral cortex had to form an
instantaneous pattern that is completely original and never appeared before in your life.
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Point 8:
Deepak Chopra Explains that there is concept of one reality
Example 1 : caterpillar turning into butterfly
what goes on invisibly inside the chrysalis remains deeply mysterious. The caterpillar’s organs and tissues dissolve into an amorphous, souplike state, only to reconstitute into the structure of a butterfly’s body that bears no resemblance to a caterpillar at all.
Science has no idea why metamorphosis evolved. It is almost impossible to imagine that insects hit on it by chance-the chemical complexity of turning into a butterfly is incredible; thousands of steps are all minutely interconnected. (It’s as if you dropped off a bicycle at the shop to be repaired, and when you came back the parts had become a Gulfstream jet.)
But we do have some idea about how this delicate chain of events is linked. Two hormones, one called juvenile hormone, the otherecdysone, regulate the process, which looks to the naked eye like a caterpillar dissolving into soup. These two hormones make sure that the cells moving from larva to butterfly know where they are going and how they are to change. Some cells are told to die; others digest themselves, while still others turn into eyes, antennae, and wings. This implies a fragile (and miraculous) rhythm that must remain in precise balance between creation and destruction. That rhythm, it turns out,depends on day length, which in turn depends on the earth’s rotation around the sun. Therefore, a cosmic rhythm has been intimately connected to the birth of butterflies for millions of years.
Science concentrates on the molecules, but this is a striking example of intelligence at work, using molecules as a vehicle for its own intent. The intent in this case was to create a new creature without wasting old ingredients. (And if there is only one reality, we can’t say, as science does, that day length causes the pupa’s hormones to begin the metamorphosis into a butterfly. Day length and hormones come from the same creative source, weaving one reality. That source uses cosmic rhythms or molecules as it sees fit. Day length doesn’t cause hormones to change any more than hormones cause the day to change—both are tied to a hidden intelligence that creates both at once. In a dream or a painting, a boy may hit a baseball, but his bat doesn’t cause the ball to fly through the air. The whole dream or painting fits together seamlessly.)
Example 2: How insects learned to fly
Two chemicals called actin andmyosin evolved eons ago to allow the muscles
in insect wings to contract and relax. Thus, insects learned to fly. When one of these paired molecules is absent, wings will grow but they cannot flap and are therefore useless. Today, the same two proteins are responsible for the beating of the human heart, and when one is absent, the person’s heartbeat is inefficient and weak, ultimately leading to heart failure.
Again, science marvels at the way molecules adapt over millions of years, but isn’t there a deeper intent? In our hearts, we feel the impulse to fly, to break free of boundaries. Isn’t that the same impulse nature expressed when insects began to take flight? The prolactin that generates milk in a mother’s breast is unchanged from the prolactin that sends salmon upstream to breed, enabling them to cross from saltwater
to fresh. The insulin in a cow is exactly the same as the insulin in an amoeba; both serve to metabolize carbohydrates, even though a cow is millions of times more complex than an amoeba.
To believe in one reality that is totally interconnected isn’t mystical at all, it turns out.
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Point 9:
One of the most spiritual figures in the twentieth century was asked how England should handle the threat of Nazism.
He replied:
I want you to fight Nazism without arms. I would like you to lay down the arms you have as being useless for saving you or humanity. You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions. Let them take possession of your beautiful island, with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these but neither your souls, nor your minds.
The author of this passage was Mahatma Gandhi, and needless to say his “open letter” to the British was greeted with shock and outrage. Yet Gandhi was being true to the principle ofAhimsa, or nonviolence.He successfully used passive nonviolence to persuade the British to grant freedom to India, so by refusing to go to war against Hitler—a stand he took throughout World War II—Gandhi was consistent in his
spiritual beliefs. Would Ahimsa really have worked to persuade Hitler, a man who declared that “war is the father of all things”? We will never know. Certainly passivity itself has a dark aspect. The Catholic Church marks as one of its darkest eras the years when it permitted millions of Jews to be killed under
Nazism, to the extent that Italian Jews were rounded up within sight of the Vatican windows.
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Point 10:
In 1971, students at Stanford University were asked to volunteer for an unusual experiment in role playing. One group of students was to pretend that they were prison guards in charge of another group who pretended to be prisoners. Although it was understood that this was make-believe, a jail setting was provided, and the two groups lived together for the duration of the experiment. According to plan,
everyone would play their roles for two weeks, but after only six days the prison experiment had to be terminated. The reason? The boys chosen for their mental health and moral values turned into sadistic,out-of-control guards on the one hand and depressed victims of exorbitant stress on the other.The professors conducting the experiment were shocked but couldn’t deny what had occurred.
The lead researcher, Philip Zimbardo, wrote: “My guards repeatedly stripped their prisoners naked, hooded them,chained them, denied them food or bedding privileges, put them into solitary confinement, and made them clean toilet bowls with their bare hands.” Those who didn’t descend to such atrocious behavior did nothing to stop the ones who did. (The parallel with infamous acts by American prison guards in Iraq in
2004 prompted Zimbardo to bring the Stanford experiment back to light after more than thirty years.) There was no extreme to which the student guards would not resort short of outright physical torture.Zimbardo mournfully recalls, “As the boredom of their job increased, they began using the prisoners as their playthings, devising ever more humiliating and degrading games for them to play. Over time, these
amusements took a sexual turn, such as having the prisoners simulate sodomy on each other. Once aware of such deviant behavior, I closed down the Stanford prison.”
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Deepak Chopra says Science is God explaining God through a human nervous system
Point 11:
When people argue that there is no scientific proof that the universe is conscious, my immediate response is, “I am conscious, and am I not an activity of the universe?” The brain, which operates on electromagnetic impulses, is as much an activity of the universe as are the electromagnetic storms in the atmosphere or on a distant star. Therefore, science is one form of electromagnetism that spends its time
studying another form. I like the remark that a physicist once made to me: “Science should never be considered the enemy of spirituality because science is its greatest ally. Science is God explaining God through a human nervous system. Isn’t spirituality the same thing?”
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Point 12:
Deepak Chopra says after seeing Apoptosis At Work No one can really remain a materialist
Phenomenon called apoptosis says “For every cell there is a time to live and a time to die.”
Apoptosis is programmed cell death, and although we don’t realize it, each of us has been dying every day, right on schedule, in order to remain alive. Cells die because they want to. The cell carefully reverses the birth process: It shrinks, it destroys its basic proteins, and then it goes on to dismantle its own DNA.Bubbles appear on the surface membrane as the cell opens its portals to the outside world and expels
every vital chemical, to finally be swallowed up by the body’s white cells exactly as they would devour an invading microbe. When the process is complete, the cell has dissolved and leaves no trace behind.
When we read this graphic account of a cell sacrificing itself so methodically, you can’t help being touched. Yet the mystical part is still to come. Apoptosis isn’t a way to get rid of sick or old cells, as you might suppose. The process gave us birth. As embryos in the womb, each of us passed through primitive stages of development when we had tadpole tails, fishlike gills, webbing between our fingers, and most
surprisingly, too many brain cells. Apoptosis took care of these unwanted vestiges—in the case of the brain, a newborn baby forms proper neural connections by removing the excess brain tissue that we were all born with. (It came as a surprise when neurologists discovered that our brains contain the most cells at
birth, a number which gets whittled down by the millions so that higher intelligence can forge its delicate web of connections. It was long thought that killing off brain cells was a pathological process associated with aging. Now the whole issue must be reconsidered.)
Apoptosis doesn’t end in the womb, however. Our bodies continue to thrive on death. The immune cells that engulf and consume invading bacteria would turn on the body’s own tissues if they didn’t induce death in each other and then turn on themselves with the same poisons used against invaders. Whenever any cell detects that its DNA is damaged or defective, it knows that the body will suffer if this defect is
passed on. Fortunately, every cell carries a poison gene known as p53 that can be activated to make itself die.
These few facts barely scratch the surface. Anatomists long ago knew that skin cells die every few days;that retinal cells, red blood cells, and stomach cells also are programmed with specific short life spans so that their tissues can be quickly replenished. Each dies for its own unique reason. Skin cells have to be
sloughed off so that our skin remains supple, while stomach cells die as part of the potent chemical combustion that digests food.
Death cannot be our enemy if we have depended upon it from the womb. Consider the following irony.As it turns out, the body is capable of taking a vacation from death by producing cells that decide to live forever. These cells don’t trigger p53 when they detect defects in their own DNA. And by refusing to issue their own death warrants, these cells divide relentlessly and invasively. Cancer, the most feared of
diseases, is the body’s vacation from death, while programmed death is its ticket to life. This is the paradox of life and death confronted head on. The mystical notion of dying every day turns out to be the body’s most concrete fact.
What this means is that we are exquisitely sensitive to the balance of positive and negative forces, and when the balance is tipped, death is the natural response. Nietzsche once remarked that humans are the only creatures who must be encouraged to stay alive. He couldn’t have known that this is literally true.Cells receive positive signals that tell them to stay alive—chemicals called growth factors. If these positive signals are withdrawn, the cell loses its will to live. Like the Mafia’s kiss of death, the cell can also be sent messengers that bind to its outer receptors to signal that death has arrived—these chemical messengers are actually known as “death activators.”
A Harvard Medical School professor had discovered an amazing fact. There is a substance that causes cancer cells to activate new blood vessels so that they
can get food. Medical research has focused on finding out how to block this unknown substance so that malignant growths can be deprived of nutrients and thus killed. The professor discovered that the exact opposite substance causes toxemia in pregnant women, a potentially fatal disorder in which the blood vessels are “unhappy” that they are undergoing normal programmed cell death. “You realize what this
means?” he said with deep awe. “The body can trigger chemicals in a balancing act between life and death, and yet science has totally ignored who is doing the balancing. Doesn’t the whole secret of health lie in that part of ourselves, not in the chemicals being used?” The fact that consciousness could be the missing ingredient, theX factor behind the scenes, came to him as a revelation.
Apoptosis rescues us from fear, I think. The death of a single cell makes no difference to the body.What counts is not the act but the plan—an overarching design that brings the balance of positive and negative signals that every cell responds to. The plan is beyond time because it dates to the very construction of time. The plan is beyond space because it is everywhere in the body and yet nowhere—every cell as it dies takes the plan with it, and yet the plan survives.
So after seeing Apoptosis At Work No one can really remain a materialist.
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Point 13:
When Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated by a religious fanatic on January 30, 1948, the killer claimed another victim. A thread. The traditional costume of the Brahmin caste included a double thread worn over the shoulder. There were many evils in the caste system, but in my mind the double thread symbolized a deep truth—that enlightenment was possible. Until modern times, everyone in India knew that the double thread was the promise of a second birth. It stood for a legacy going back before memory began. Today, enlightenment is no longer the goal of life, not even in India. The most that any teacher can do is to open the door again; he can answer three questions in the age-old way:
• Who am I?You are the totality of the universe acting through a human nervous system.
• Where did I come from?You came from a source that was never born and will never die.
• Why am I here?To create the world in every moment.
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