Deepak Chopra and Intent

By Deepak Chopra, M.D., FACP, P. Murali Doraiswamy, MBBS, FRCP, Professor of Psychiatry, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina, 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), Neil Theise, MD, Professor, Pathology and Medicine, (Division of Digestive Diseases) Beth Israel Medical Center — Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, Menas C. Kafatos, Ph.D., Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor in Computational Physics, Chapman University

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 common-sensical, 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.

Many thinkers have tried to wriggle out of this apparent trap, but without success.  Our position is that their denial serves only to keep the human mind encaged, creating further and further problems for our collective and individual selves. We entitled this series of posts “Can Reality Set Us Free?” to underscore that by its very nature, the human mind is not limited, not even by its own short-sighted concepts. Boundaries and edges, the things that separate one thing from another, are always conceptual, manmade.  Where does your body stop?  From the everyday level of scale, your boundary is your skin.  From the atomic level of scale you and the planet are linked – every atom in your body comes from water, earth, and air taken in from the planet.  From this perspective, human beings don’t liver on the planet, we are the planet. Reality itself is a seamless flowing process where all phenomena are linked.  There are no actual boundaries.

Likewise, what we call an event constitutes another manmade boundary. The universe is constantly bubbling at the quantum level. Where we live, this bubbling looks linear as event A leads to event B, what we call A causes B. However, at finer levels of bubbling, time emerges, which means that below that level, getting very near the source, the bubbles aren’t occurring in the realm of time.

But the most liberating boundary that anyone can break free of is the one that encircles the mind, like a fence around a corral, so that there is “my” mind and “your” mind (like two different horses inside the corral), and using a bigger fence, the “human” mind, which is so self-enclosed that outside the corral there is “no” mind.   Several of the quantum pioneers, such as Planck and Schrödinger, had enough clarity to see that this boundary, too, is manmade.  There is only one consciousness, in fact, and it must be basic to creation.

Reality, then, is boundless, immeasurable, and conscious. It cannot be otherwise if the three-part model and complementarity are correct, which has been demonstrated over and over.  This is more than finicky wrangling among philosophers. The tracks of consciousness are apparent throughout creation, and what is more, when they appear, these tracks link up in analogous ways. It’s our position that the self-organizing nature of the universe is the most fundamental manifestation of consciousness (for more on these themes, see video by co-author Neil Theise.

In biology, it is undeniable that living things organize themselves, using DNA as the basic template. Adult horses create baby horses; horse livers create new liver cells; each cell sustains the process of eating, breathing, excreting, dividing, and so on. This self-organization depends on interacting with the environment using feedback loops that constantly promote survival. Being adaptable to their surroundings, horses can survive high in Montana or below sea level in Death Valley.  A horse can run or stand still. It can be pregnant or not. These are massive changes of state, but the horse’s body adapts, all the way from the cellular to the molecular level. If a condition arises that makes adaptation impossible, such as a total absence of drinking water, the animal dies. It is quite astonishing how self-organization and feedback loops maintain balance at every level from biomolecules up through each cell, tissue, and organ to create the entire body.

The crucial factor here is allowing for order while keeping randomness in check. At every level of Nature there is always a limited degree of randomness when an orderly structure, from the atom to a full-gown Arabian stallion, interacts with its surroundings.  Too much and there is no self-organization, just disorder.  Too little, and the self-organization can’t change pattern to adapt when the environment changes.  In other words, if a horse had only a fixed slow heartbeat, it couldn’t run, and if its heart raced uncontrollably, it would drop dead.  But in a defined zone of “quenched disorder,” creative adaptations can take place, bubbling into existence and disappearing if adaptation is not required.

If we scrutinize a horse at various levels, we see atoms, molecules, cells, tissues, organs, and finally the complete creature. But so far as Nature is concerned, there is only endless adaptation as one level retains its own integrity while meshing into the next level.  Complementarity in biology is thus the relationship between each of these levels. Choosing one perspective excludes all others at the time of observation. Choose to look at the body at the everyday level, and you can’t see the cells.  Go down to the molecular level, and cells vanish from view.  But it is the sum of all these levels that are your body.

This dynamic stream of cooperation is the modern equivalent of the religious notion of the Great Chain of Being.  That notion held that God seamlessly united every level of creation. In non-religious terms, we say that complex systems have organized themselves and then merge into even greater degrees of complexity. The fact that increasingly denser amounts of information can be so elegantly ordered from complex molecules to the human brain implies a mind that pervades the universe. It exists as never-ending feedback loops that provide balance, growth, and adaptability.

With this scheme in mind, it is possible to arrive at a meaningful universe.  The attributes that we call human, actually pervade creation. Besides self-organization, there is evolution and unexpected creative leaps.  We possess them because we are of the universe, not because we are particularly special and separate within the universe.

Our viewpoint isn’t likely to be persuasive to scientists who restrict themselves to reductionism, which by its nature examines only isolated segments of complex systems. But it’s one thing to study the function of the kidney or lung and quite another to claim that the rest of the body doesn’t count.  The part cannot make a greater claim to reality than the whole. We live in fortunate times. The separate researches of countless scientists have arrived at such a sophisticated level that the interaction of complex systems has given rise to theories of complexity, and on the horizon there looms a General Theory of Complexity.  We don’t know if that’s the name such a theory will take. What we do know is that the desire to know the whole of reality isn’t just a human quirk or poetic fancy.  That there is only one reality is undeniable. We can choose to remain selective, approaching reality as boxes within boxes. Or we can set ourselves free by throwing out boxes, boundaries, and limitations of all sorts.

As the uniting factor that sets us free, “consciousness” is a term that is repugnant to many scientists – mostly from an older generation – and mysterious to all.  But that doesn’t excuse blindness and neglect.  Reality keeps doing its thing, totally conscious of us while we keep evolving to become more conscious of it.  That’s been the story for many centuries.  Evolution isn’t going to stop; our hope is that it can be sped up, for the good of all.

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)

By Deepak Chopra, MD Senior Scientist The Gallup Organization, and Jim Clifton, Chairman and CEO of Gallup Organization

Over the past decade the word “fear” has become all too familiar. After 9/11 critics of the war on terror called it fear-mongering. After the financial crash of 2008, living in a climate of fear became the lot of millions of people who lost their jobs, retirement accounts, and homes.  But what about the most basic fear, which undermines society itself, the fear of bodily harm, either through crime or terrorism?        Walking the streets in countries around the world carries a real risk of being attacked. The incidence of kidnapping has skyrocketed in Mexico and South America. The shocking rates of rape have come to light in India.  Religious factions in the Islamic world create havoc and death for ordinary citizens.

In the face of such violence, the prevalence of fear can have a profound effect on the health, well-being, and economic development: if a society is in a constant state of fear, it won’t produce anything good.

                Since this issue has such strong implications, Gallup’s World Poll set out to quantify fear of bodily harm.  The usual measure, police reports and crime statistics, aren’t particularly reliable, since what they report is how many criminals were pursued or caught.  If a city has a lousy police force, it doesn’t catch many criminals, and thus it may appear that there isn’t much crime. (Ironically, if a reform-minded mayor brings in an effective police chief, and the chief does a great job at arresting more criminals, it can present the appearance of crime going up.)  A contributing factor is non-reporting. Statistics don’t reveal the large number of victims who don’t go to the police after being robbed, raped, or assaulted on the streets.   Sad to say, unreported crime is a major factor globally.

In trying to give governments a more accurate picture of crime and fear, Gallup scientists found one survey question that gets to the heart of the matter: “Do you feel safe walking alone at night in the city or area where you live?” The answer to that single question tells leaders almost everything they need to know about their citizens’ sense of safety. People who feel unsafe are preoccupied to the point that their well-being deteriorates. Over time, fear worsens how their entire lives will turn out.

The results of our research are stark.  We found that women in sub-Saharan Africa, for example, don’t feel safe walking just 100 meters from their villages, possibly because they fear being raped or beaten. As a result, they can’t walk to markets to buy or sell goods. In the event that their fear is lifted, these women would increase Africa’s GDP a little or a lot with their lost economic activity.

The same effect can strike closer to home. One of us, Jim Clifton, lives in Georgetown, an affluent neighborhood in Washington, D.C. Several years ago, Georgetown had a serious crime spree, and people started going home directly after work, and once home, they tended to stay in. As fear spread about walking alone after dark, spending on everyday things like shopping and dining out decreased significantly. The neighborhood’s economy suffered until law and order was restored through an ambitious effort by local law enforcement.

These are just two examples of fear’s pernicious reach.  Leaders who want to dramatically reduce fear among their citizens would be wise to make the Gallup fear metric central to their strategies – our findings are as important, we feel, as police reports and crime rates. Here are  some of the basic findings:

% AFRAID  (to walk alone in their neighborhood)

Venezuela      74%

Afghanistan      60%

Russia               50%

Congo               50%

Mexico             44%

India                  35%

United States   25%

Canada             16%

China                 16%

Hong Kong       11%

Americans deserve to be shocked to find that a quarter of their fellow citizens are afraid to walk the streets. Gallup tracks the fear score of U.S. citizens nightly and finds huge variance by city.   For instance, in the U.S., the three big metro areas with the least fear are Minneapolis, Denver, and Raleigh — with about 20% of their citizens reporting they have fear walking alone at night. At the other end are Memphis and New Orleans, where more than a whopping 40% of citizens say they fear walking alone at night.

Fear is sometimes correlated with actual danger, but that’s not the real point. Fear is personal and subjective. It gains its power, as terrorists well know, through the perception that you are in danger.

We feel that any government which believes in open communication should publish the fear index for their city or nation, aiming to start a dialogue about how to reduce the causes of fear. Just as important is to close the gap between perception and reality as far as risks are concerned.  That 25% of Americans are afraid to walk alone doesn’t mean that one out of four of us are in danger of bodily harm.

Gallup doesn’t aim its research at endorsing specific solutions. A rigid law and order society like Singapore isn’t the same as the United States, nor is the enforced conformity of China.  On the other hand, the perception of fear, as it arises in the individual, has known causes.  People become more afraid when:

• They feel isolated and alone.
• Their surroundings undergo rapid change.
• Minorities and outsiders are labeled “them,” who are totally unlike “us.”
• Support structures begin to deteriorate, including police, fire departments, churches, and designated services for the poor and elderly.

In other words, a high score on the fear index calls for better solutions than clamping down on civil liberties and sending the police out on random stop-and-search patrols.   For any leader who cares about this issue, we’ve built consistent sampling frames across 160 countries that represent the vast majority of the world’s population, and Gallup analysts again found huge variance in the hearts and minds of citizens by region.

Globally, the implications of this data are fascinating. Imagine how much different a person’s peace of mind is in Venezuela, where 74% are afraid to walk alone at night, or in Afghanistan, where nearly 60% are afraid, versus Canada (16%) or Hong Kong (10%). Think about how much more psychological energy a society has when people don’t live with chronic anxiety. In countries like the U.S., even under conditions many consider a climate of fear, one only has to witness how an anxiety level that is relatively low impacts  entrepreneurship, innovation,  health, and well-being — all the things that make human development possible.

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By Deepak Chopra, M.D., FACP, P. Murali Doraiswamy, MBBS, FRCP, Professor of Psychiatry, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina, 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), Neil Theise, MD, Professor, Pathology and Medicine, (Division of Digestive Diseases) Beth Israel Medical Center — Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, Menas C. Kafatos, Ph.D., Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor in Computational Physics, Chapman University

Reality has gone into a strange, dark place – quite literally. Historically, quantum physics and the theory of relativity are responsible for demolishing the familiar world presented to us by the five senses.  It first dismantled things we take for granted, such as solid objects, fixed linear time, and straightforward cause and effect. Now in its second century, the quantum model in particular has become even more unsettling. The universe, allegedly, is 96% dark matter and energy, which reduces the visible world to a thin mist dispersed unevenly through the unknown, unseen “real” reality.

In our first post we proposed that living as if nothing has changed in the nature of reality isn’t satisfactory.   What if “real” reality is affecting our lives all the time? It’s a fascinating possibility.  To explore it, we propose that the basic principles of quantum physics do, in fact, apply to the everyday human world, and when one accepts that they are pervasive, their weirdness diminishes, and the result is a leap forward for human evolution.   The first principle we’re exploring is complementarity, which serves to unite all kinds of things that seem totally different or even opposite, such as the two aspects of quanta, which can behave like particles or waves depending on how an observer measures them. (Please read the first installment in this series of posts, where we explored the nature of duality.)

In everyday language, complementarity tells a physicist that apparent opposites need each other – they are complementary – in order to fill out a complete picture.  At first glance, complementarity seems exotic and arcane, because its applications are most clearly relevant at the smallest measurable scale of Nature, the domain of intricate quantum-mechanical calculations. The scale of this realm is billions of times smaller than the period at the end of this sentence.  But this doesn’t mean that a wall divides the micro and macro world.  There is only one reality, not two.  If the behavior of a quark looks totally different from the behavior of, say, the human brain, this may be illusory.  The dividing wall could be conceptual, merely an idea we stubbornly cling to.

The six blind men in the Indian fable who try to describe an elephant can only grasp one part of the beast. The blind man holding on to the tail says that an elephant is like a rope; the one holding the trunk says an elephant is like a snake; the one holding a leg says an elephant is like a tree, and so on.  The fable was meant as an allegory, telling us that the five senses and the rational mind (the six blind men) can’t grasp Brahman, the All that represents reality itself.  That problem hasn’t gone away; it morphed into a quantum principle, which says that some aspects of quantum behavior are always hidden from view the moment one decides which part of the elephant to grab on to.  Every measurement gives us a bit of information while the rest remains concealed. (By analogy, if you snap a photo of an ocean wave approaching the beach, you can measure how tall the wave is but not how fast it’s moving – your snapshot freezes reality in place, losing one of its key aspects: reality is always on the move.)

Complementarity enters to collate all the snapshots.  It provides a mosaic that seems reassuring, because every snapshot has to be compatible with every other, no matter how different, just as the elephant’s tail and leg, which seem so unalike to the blind men, actually belong to one beast.  Unfortunately, in the human world, a mosaic isn’t good enough. We operate by using hidden connections, shifting ambiguity, and uncertainty alternating with knowledge, not to mention imagination, faith, intuition, and creative leaps. Our existence is so dynamic that it would take a kind of super (or expanded) complementarity to bring any kind of unity.  As board games go, living a single day as a human being is like multi-dimensional chess as compared to Chinese checkers.

Finding the mathematics that unites wave and particle took the collaboration of great minds like Einstein’s and Bohr’s, but you and I apply super complementarity all the time.   We leave the visible world, enter a shadowy twilight domain, and fetch a phantom which then emerges as a new object to be experienced – that’s exactly what it means to remember something.  The new object consists of firings in the brain that make a memory feel real; the shadowy domain is a mysterious place where memories exist without a physical trace (in a virtual state, to use the jargon of physics); an untapped memory is invisible and yet filled with the potential to become real.

The two aspects of memory are as opposed as wave and particle yet replete with far more mystery. Neuroscientists still don’t understand how the mind/brain creates whole memory experiences, and there is a strong nonlocal aspect to it.  People often create false memories and many memories we recall are often subtly different from what actually happened.  As the pioneering researcher Wilder Penfield showed in 1960s stimulating subregions of the hippocampus (or even single cell columns during surgery) can bring back specific memories. Physicists are accustomed to the notion that a quantum can be either local or non-local; in particle form it has a specific location, but in wave form the quantum field where waves arise spreads throughout spacetime. Since no one has proposed a location for memories when they are mere potentials waiting to be awakened, could it be that they, too, are non-local?

As it relates to memory (or any mental event), super complementarity isn’t a principle but a process. It’s baffling that you can remember your tenth birthday, your first kiss, or the word “hippopotamus” without knowing how you do it.  The history of physics testifies that reality does its thing long before anyone can explain how (apples fell off trees before Newton, after all).  The process of memory bridges two worlds, hiding one from the other while making sure that they are indissolubly joined.  We should be thankful that this is so.  When you remember something, the neurological activity in your brain is hidden from your awareness.  It takes thousands of orchestrated neuronal firings to produce even the simplest thought, and if you had to be aware of them, or do the orchestrating yourself, bit by bit, mental life would break down, and with it, everyday life as we know it.

On the positive side, the mind is intensely interested in itself, and it isn’t satisfied with the status quo.   Maybe super complementarity can be improved. There are amazing examples of people who fetch answers from the invisible domain far beyond any normal capacity.  Recently, for example, the death of Shakuntala Devi, “the human computer,” was announced, at age 83. The child of circus performers in India, she exhibited innate mathematical abilities that defy explanation.  As the New York Times reported,

In 1977, at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, she extracted the 23rd root of a 201-digit number in 50 seconds, beating a Univac computer, which took 62 seconds.

The application of complementarity to such a feat isn’t obvious, until you realize that Shakuntala Devi didn’t perform her calculations one digit at a time; she apparently went to the place where the answer already exists.   As the Times notes,

In 1980, she correctly multiplied two 13-digit numbers in only 28 seconds at the Imperial College in London. The feat, which earned her a place in the 1982 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records, was even more remarkable because it included the time to recite the 26-digit solution.

Such a feat has a distinctly quantum ring to it. In the classical world, events are explained in linear time with cause linked to effect like dominos in a row.   Doing arithmetic follows this model, except when it doesn’t. Shakuntala Devi’s ability stands for a whole host of mental operations that aren’t assembled by linking one bit with another in sequence. If you are asked to see your mother’s face in your mind’s eye, you don’t see the nose, then add the ears, a smile, two eyes. Instead, the entire image appears.  The quantum flavor of everyday thinking is unmistakable, because you can choose when to resort to linear cause and effect (e.g., looking at a map to find the shortest route to Boise, Idaho) and when to escape into other modes of knowing reality (e.g., imagining how the Mona Lisa would look with a miniature poodle in her arms).

In simple terms, the extraordinary individuals who exhibit remarkable abilities are gifted with expanded awareness – this is true of a “human computer” but also of creative artists, geniuses, and savants of various kinds.  One key to expanded awareness is seeing how far complementarity can reach, as we’ll now explore.

2.

            The most fascinating extension of complementarity has to do with complex systems.  To a physicist, explaining how a pair of electrons behave together in outer space poses a major challenge; explaining how billions of neurons behave together in the brain defies not just the world’s largest computer but possibly any computer one can conceive of.  Yet complex systems, including all life forms, stars, galaxies, and the post-Big Bang cosmos,  are perfect examples of how looking at the whole can help explain the parts and vice versa.

            Systems science has validated the adage about the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. Studying the materials that the great cathedral of Notre Dame is made of –  stone, metals, stained glass, etc. – can give hints about the building and the historical times when it was constructed, but by no means is the great cathedral just the sum of these parts. It was created by conscious beings and reveals a living presence that dead physical objects cannot account for.

            No matter how closely one examines the visible parts, there remains the riddle of how complexity arises, what holds it together, and why structures take the shape they do. In complex systems, the whole transcends its discrete parts even when some aspects of organization are hidden, unlike the architects of Notre Dame, who could unfold their blueprints in plain sight.

            Another way to express this is by saying that like a cathedral, no complex system can be achieved by a series of simple operations. Carpentry and masonry are basic processes that go into making any building, but there is an infinite variety of buildings, and they depend upon a conception of the whole before you go to work.  Reductionism in science is the methodology of exploring the universe one brick and plank at a time, in discrete units. This cannot be the total story.  To believe that reductionism is all we need misses the whole point.

            In fact, when a physicist examines any complementary pairs, he notices that they appear to be paradoxical, since no aspect can apply under exactly the same conditions.  One construct of the pair excludes the other. Today science has reached the same levels of the paradoxical that ancient seers and sages knew from personal experience.  What is more paradoxical than human nature, since we are the most violent and at the same time the most compassionate of living things?

            The dichotomy between what science studies (so-called objective reality) and what humans experience (anchored in subjective reality) is not fundamental – it merges into the complementary nature of existence. What we’ve called super complementarity embraces the subject and the object.  The process of observing them makes both work together, even while each excludes the other.  Science works from models out of a desire for closure, and excluding unwanted contradictions, as reductionism does, seems to offer it. But Nature doesn’t.  Return to Notre Dame for a moment. How many ways can you observe it?

            You can see it as a colossal solid mass casting a shadow and blocking out whatever stands behind it.

            You can see it as a building with no particular significance except to provide shelter.

            You can see it religiously as a church, or historically as an example of high Gothic architecture.

            But these perspectives are only the beginning. Monet saw cathedrals as shimmering creations of light and color, with no solidity at all.  The deeply religious see them as symbols of the marriage between Christ and his worshipers. Medieval pilgrims saw them as repositories of miracles, a space inhabited by God. There is no single way to view Notre Dame, and the versatility of our minds, which can choose any perspective and invent new ones, isn’t accidental. It mirrors Nature’s versatility in devising a wholeness open to every possible angle of observation.

            This says that complementarity rules.  There is no fruitful way to use the terms “whole” and “part” without seeing that what matters is how they relate, not what they appear to be.  In complex systems, no relationship exists in the first place without a mind to create the relationship.  You can build a house from field stones gathered after plowing an acre of hard New England ground. Without the concept of “house,” however, the stones aren’t building blocks.

            Each concept erects a boundary around itself.  (As a test, think of how many ways you can use an ordinary red brick. If you stay within the normal boundary, you might use a brick to build a wall or as a doorstop or as a weight to press dried flowers. But you can also grind the brick into a powder to tint red paint – suddenly it has lost one boundary and entered another.) Once placed inside a boundary, a thing can be understood, but since every boundary is a mental construct, the only way to reach complete understanding is either:  A. Look at every possible boundary or B. Erase all the boundaries. The second path is much more fruitful.  It opens you to the wonder of Notre Dame, not by adding up every narrow angle that it can be looked at from, but by envisioning the whole.

            The beauty of the human mind – again mirroring Nature itself – is that it can grasp wholeness.  We stand in awe before the Grand Canyon, not needing a swarm of geologists to pick away at the rocks as a means of getting there. Geology provides data; only a view of the whole provides awe.  There is a profound mystery in how the mind resolves the paradoxical divisions in Nature.  We’ll explore this uncanny ability in the next post. It will take us to the very heart of reality and the role that consciousness plays in turning a jumble of raw data into the richness of the world we live in.

(To be cont.)

Deepak Chopra, MD is the author of more than 70 books with twenty-one New York Times bestsellers 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)

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) Beth Israel Medical Center — Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York.

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

By Deepak Chopra, M.D., FACP, P. Murali Doraiswamy, MBBS, FRCP, Professor of Psychiatry, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina, 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), Neil Theise, MD, Professor, Pathology and Medicine, (Division of Digestive Diseases) Beth Israel Medical Center — Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, Menas C. Kafatos, Ph.D., Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor in Computational Physics, Chapman University

It sounds distressing to be trapped in perpetual illusion.  Reality is reassuring – or it’s supposed to be – and victims of a mental disorder like schizophrenia struggle desperately to get back there.  So does Neo, the hero of The Matrix, who joins the rebels to fight against the ultimate illusion, an all-enveloping, three-dimensional, hallucination forced on the population as a computer program so that artificial intelligence can exploit them for fuel. Physicists had more than a mild reason to be intrigued.  The quantum revolution did the same job that Neo tries to do, defeating a whole host of illusions imposed by the five senses. But outside the movies, it turns out that people fight just as hard to keep the illusion intact. Security, even as an illusion, is a hard thing to shake.

It’s innocuous to keep referring to “sunrise” and “sunset” when we know full well that it’s the Earth that moves around the sun or, more precisely, they are both in constant motion relative to each other.  There’s no bother about saying, “I dropped my book on the floor,” even though according to physics, gravity is a two-way street. Your eyes tell you that your book fell to the floor because the floor is your frame of reference.  If the book is the still point of your frame of reference, it is the floor that meets the book. And if a wider frame encloses your view (from the vintage point of the whole solar system, for example), then the book and our planet move toward each other.

Our compromise with the five senses keeps in place a wrap-around, twenty-four seven, three-dimensional illusion. This is the real Matrix. The major reason for not fighting to get out of our willed illusion is that life runs smoothly and safely enough inside the bubble.  The name of some quantum discoveries, like the Uncertainty Principle, is enough to induce faint queasiness.  But incrementally, the quantum worldview has overturned so many aspects of the physical world that by now, quite literally, nothing we casually take to be real actually is. Solid objects aren’t solid; time doesn’t move in a straight line; cause and effect have become unhinged; 96% of the universe is supposedly composed of dark matter and dark energy, which are totally unlike ordinary matter and energy – and so on.

It isn’t even clear that quantum physics will remain a satisfactory model for reality, especially on the “dark” side.  Although its mathematical basis has proved remarkably accurate, once you reach the border where time and space disappear into the quantum vacuum, physics becomes remarkably speculative (i.e., divorced from direct experimental evidence).  The public hears about impressively arcane theories of superstrings and the multiverse while inside the game, theoretical physicists wonder if these theories aren’t just one illusion competing for acceptance against another. The pitfalls of theology, where any notion of God can succeed if enough people believe in it, aren’t that far away, and yet science prides itself on being the very opposite of theology.

We’ve offered this fairly long introduction in order to pose a simple question that will be confronted in a series of posts: If we are trapped inside a convincing illusion, can reality set us free? Do we want it to? “Freedom” is a very human word. It’s the opposite of enslavement. In this case, if we are all enslaved, our oppressors are familiar things we live with so naturally (the five senses, rationality, the solid physical world, the passage of time from past to future) that the tables have turned. Being real feels threatening; enslavement is comforting.  Who wants to adapt to unfiltered reality if it means  life in a phantom world of invisible energy fields, unpredictable events, and shadows that wink in and out of existence?

We will argue that however threatening, reality is the only thing that can lead to a higher state of freedom. No one is being asked to leap into the domain of quarks and hadrons, which would be physically impossible to begin with. Instead, we are proposing that certain fundamental principles, originally uncovered by quantum physics, are not confined to the quantum domain. They are operating here and now at the level of life all around us and in fact everywhere.  There aren’t two independent realities, one arcane and quantum, the other familiar and comforting. There is only one reality, and being our home, it must be understood fully, with all its implications for everyday life.

The first principle we’ll deal with is known as complementarity, one of the rocks that quantum physics was built on.  Among many other things, complementarity tells a physicist why two particles separated by vast distances in space manage to act instantaneously together, as if they were next to each other, communicating with each other. By implication this seemingly technical term also applies to two neurons talking to each other far apart in the human brain, and indeed to all biological systems. If that’s true, as we believe it is, then an esoteric aspect of quantum reality holds the key to the reality you experience every time you have a thought, wish, fear, desire, or dream.

Duality and complementarity

Complementarity unites the apparent division that lies at the core of reality.  Complementarity though is not division. The opposites appear to be irreconcilable but they depend, as we will see, on the specific ways we observe them. As limits of observations are exhausted, or as “horizons of knowledge” are reached, the complementary pairs emerge, each member of the pair being necessary to complete the whole.

This division is expressed as wave and particle, two behaviors that are fundamental in treating quanta, the tiny bits of matter-energy that we thought were tiny solid particles.  When a photon, the quantum of light, is behaving like a wave, it has no precise location in time and space, but when the wave function collapses, to use physics jargon, a photon behaves like a particle with a specific location and measurable properties.  This sounds like a technical distinction, but there is no doubt that both behaviors are necessary for a complete understanding of the universe.  The problem is that the two behaviors make photons – and all other quanta – shape shifters. They “decide” or “choose” to be one way or the other depending on the decisions of the observer (you or a quantum physicist) about how to view it.  This concept is deeply disconcerting to anyone, including Einstein, who wants reality to be stable and consistent.  The key to complementarity is to understand that whichever choice of viewing is made, some aspects of what is viewed will be hidden; at the same time, a reality of the object observed comprises both sets of characteristics, the seen and the unseen.  So, if you design an experiment to display the wave-like properties of light, you will see light behave as a wave; choose the other way and the light will reveal itself to be discrete particles of energy.  Any specific view leaves something out; all views together comprise the totality of what is.  We observers are, however, never able to see or experience that totality “all at once.”

The fact that the universe is unavoidably dual means that it is both visible and invisible, for example; things are present before our eyes (and scientific instruments) but, until examined, dwell in a twilight, virtual state completely out of sight, neither this nor that, but both. In some sense, certainty coexists with uncertainty, a situation as unsettling as telling someone that their future is both predetermined and subject to free will.  Particle-like and wave-like behaviors are inextricably connected and must be inherent in any world description. This is where complementarity comes in, to allow duality to perform its function while not losing the whole picture (much as a father might separate two bickering children by saying, “Stop fighting. Remember, whatever your differences, you’re part of the same family.”).

To a working physicist, complementarity comes down to measuring the quantum world in such a way that it can be understood in the ordinary world.  The standard formulation of quantum mechanics, known as the Copenhagen Interpretation, made complementarity essential, as common sense tells us it must be. The two ways of measuring a photon, for example, must complement each other, and when added together, any way of measuring a phenomenon, if it is valid, must mathematically fit every other valid way.  This is far more than a kiss-and-make-up approach, because there exist quantum behaviors so weird and “spooky” (to use Einstein’s term) that everyday perception cannot accept them.   Two particles that act like twins even though separated by billions of light years, reverse causation that moves backward, quantum tunneling (which allows a particle to move from point A to point B without covering the space in between), and the possibility of ignoring cause and effect altogether, are prime examples. The fact that complementarity can bring these behaviors into the realm of experience, what we call classical Newtonian physics, depends almost completely upon mathematical coherence. The thinking mind can’t grasp them otherwise.

Or can it? Our position is that if complementarity links the quantum world and the classical world, the two are actually connected. Not just mathematics but real experience should verify this fact.  It hardly seems adequate to say, in effect, “This quantum weirdness works out in complex equations, but forget it when you’re talking about the world around us.”  Denying complementarity to everyday experience lets duality win the game and in some sense everyone, ultimately, loses.  The numbers point to an underlying unity, but as we walk the streets and live our lives, nothing could be more removed than quantum behavior. As it happens, complementarity plays a pivotal role in showing how short-sighted such a view is. We can examine how a generalized complementarity principle might in the future be developed, allowing opposites such as the pairs below, to stand against each other, in order to produce a more complete picture of the entire reality:

Predetermined versus Open to choice

Caused versus Causeless

Potential versus Actual

Invisible versus Visible

Unmanifest versus Manifest

Random versus Purposeful

Meaningless versus Meaningful

As much as it irks physicists when their specialty is intruded upon with ordinary language, these labels describe the dualities that puzzle quantum theory and at the same time impinge on everyday life.  Imagine that you are asked to see an ostrich in your mind’s eye.  At the moment you are asked, followed by the moment when you see the ostrich, each of these dualities comes into play.

Predetermined versus Open to choice

All the processes happening in our brain are connected by the laws of chemistry and electromagnetism to each other, and since those laws are inflexible, every brain activity should be predetermined. Yet obviously “ostrich” is a word chosen through free will, as is your decision to see an ostrich in your mind’s eye, or not.

Caused versus Causeless

If you do see an ostrich, the request from someone else caused you to. But if you ignore the request, it caused nothing.  What made you decide one way or the other? There may be no reason at all (causeless) or you might be irritated to be interrupted in what you were doing (caused).

Potential versus Actual

When you bring up the image of an ostrich in your mind’s eye, it actually exists. But before you brought it up, it was merely a potential, residing somewhere “else”, out of sight. Where is that place? We call it memory, but neuroscience has never found a physical trace of the memories we turn into images at a moment’s notice.

Invisible versus Visible

This is another trait of memories, that they move automatically from the invisible to the visible, even though we don’t go anywhere or knowingly do anything physical to retrieve them.

Unmanifest versus Manifest

Once an ostrich appears in our mind’s eye, there is activity in the visual cortex, but there is no brain activity associated with having a memory, storing it, or organizing it while in storage.  The process of manifestation depends upon the unmanifest, yet no physical link has ever been found.

Random versus Purposeful

Being asked to imagine an ostrich could be a random choice, or there could be a reason behind it. Until you ask, it lingers in both realms.

Meaningless versus Meaningful

The whole affair of imagining ostriches could be whimsical – any other bird would do – or you might be kicked by an escaped ostrich form the zoo tomorrow, which suggests a hidden but meaningful link, the kind we call synchronicity.

It’s obvious that these opposites are necessary to each other, in real life as in physics. You cannot choose only one of the pair and stubbornly exclude the other.  In fact, one implies the other. Which one you choose depends on how you are participating in an event and how you choose to look at it. That’s exactly what the Copenhagen Interpretation said. However, the Copenhagen Interpretation still assumed two worlds, one classical and one quantum. Evolved versions of what is now standard quantum theory went a step further, implying a quantum world that appears to be made of different level of reality. Yet as established as complementarity is in modern physics, its implications are hotly resisted in many quarters. An artificial wall is placed between the quantum and classical worlds, under the following rule: Phenomena in quantum mechanics are unrelated to macro events in the everyday world.  Yet this is clearly not the case. The quantum world needs our participation, and the everyday world needs to incorporate quantum principles.

Getting real is the name of the game, as we’ll discuss more fully in the next post.

Deepak Chopra, MD is the author of more than 70 books with twenty-one New York Times bestsellers 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)

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) Beth Israel Medical Center — Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York.

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

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