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Subtle action is the most powerful tool we have to change our energy. Deepak Chopra explains how we can change the energy in our daily lives by viewing our bodies as a flowing process guided by energy.
Recently I've been discussing how to change your energy. Many problems--physical and mental--seem to come down to a person's beliefs, habits, lifestyle, moods and emotions.
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The mind gives us mastery over our lives far more than people recognize. It's become unrespectable to make such claims for the mind, because the fashion is to give all credit to the brain. In the first part of this post we argued that the mind, although invisible, is the true creator of reality, including the brain's reality.

Let's see how far this bold statement can take us.

There's no doubt that you possess hidden powers. You have mastered levels of nature you aren't aware of. When you reach for a piece of chocolate, your desire is carried out by your arm automatically. Yet away from your awareness, the motor cortex in your brain sent electro-chemical signals to your arm muscles. You aren't aware of this level of nature, but it obeys you nonetheless.

Going to an inner level, brain and muscle cannot do anything without thousands of chemical reactions taking place in every cell each second. These also obey your command to reach for a piece of chocolate. Since cells operate by creating new proteins and enzymes, we can say that you literally create whatever is needed to carry out your desires. There is no gap between what you want and what your body does. (When there is a gap, some disorder or disease process has created damage in the chain of command.) The quantum world, where atoms interact to form the building blocks of life, is open to consciousness.

Once we get to this ultra-subtle level of nature, more is coming into being than just particles and waves, although that is primarily what quantum physics studies. Time and space also come into being. Are they under the mind's command, also? We speak casually about people who rewrite the past to suit themselves. What if that is literally true?

In the laboratory, isolated experiments have shown that photons can travel from point A to point B without crossing the space in between: this is a rudimentary form of teleportation. In the same vein, when an observer performs the classic experiment that determines whether light will act as a wave or a particle (we discussed this in Part 1 of this post), the so-called observer effect can be delayed. A beam of light can wait until a second observer, using a second piece of equipment, makes a later observation. Then and only then does it "decide" to be a wave or particle.

Without going into complications, what is happening is a rudimentary way of changing the past. By delaying what will be observed, an action in the future is able to change an action in the past. History is literally rewritten. Of course, in both these cases, whether we are talking about teleportation or changing the past, the experiments are isolated and very tiny. Yet speculative thinking carries us to exciting possibilities.

In science fiction time travel is common, but in real life it supposedly can't exist. Why not? Because time travel runs into paradoxes. Here's a familiar one: if you travel back in time and kill your grandfather, you wouldn't be born. Since you were never born, you can't travel back in time to kill anybody, thereby negating your ability to not be born. A paradox. But in the rich spiritual tradition of India, there's a way out. One could rise to a level of consciousness that escapes the limitations of time. This so-called state of enlightenment exists in everyone, potentially. If any person is able to master time, by implication there must be a way to explain how it works.

The observer effect gives us a clue. Simply by looking at light in the laboratory, and doing nothing else, an observer can determine whether the light is a wave or particle. There's nothing special about light being shone in a lab. Ordinary light is affected by the observer effect. In fact, everything you are looking at right now depends upon you to exist.

This includes not just objects and events but time itself. Time didn't create you; you created time. Other sentient beings would perceive time in totally different ways. Why, then, do two people agree when they look at their watches? Because as life forms, we are set up to repeat the perceptions of our ancestors. Our brains are the depository of all the realities that have been experienced over two billion years. DNA makes us who we are, in terms of brain activity. However, our every action alters DNA at the same time.

In this case, we cannot tell the dancer from the dance, to paraphrase the poet W.B. Yeats. His famous line even implies the observer effect: "O brightening glance, how can we know the dancer from the dance?" Sitting here in the present, you and I aren't aware of being the masters of time, but if we knew our consciousness deeply enough, we would see it. After all, before the advent of microscopes, no one would have believe that thinking "I want some chocolate" depends upon mastery of quantum reactions.

The latest Nobel Prize in physics was given for the basic discovery of how photons can carry information through fiber optic cables. That represents the state of current knowledge. The late Herms Romijn, a brilliant Dutch neurologist, surmised that photons also carry consciousness. They interface everyday reality with the quantum world and beyond to the realm of intelligence, information, and awareness.

You aren't aware that you create the scent of a rose by smelling it, or that what you decide today can alter something you did yesterday. None of us were raised to think that way. But as speculative thinkers, backed up by thousands of years of spiritual insight and the most current experimental evidence, we believe that thinking can be changed. It must. As long as we remain prisoners of materialism, destined to obey random events and subatomic interactions over which we have no power, the true nature of mind will be distorted. More importantly, we will postpone the day when we can master every level of nature through no more than the wisp of a thought and the power of an intention.

Published in the San Francisco Chronicle

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We live in an age where massive amounts of money are spent for research into the brain and almost nothing into researching the mind. This represents a huge demotion. In prior centuries the mind was exalted. It was the mind that perceived beauty, experienced love, and reached for God. Can the brain really do all those things on its own? Neuroscience says yes, but that's a leap of faith. Why would a neuron have any interest in beauty, love, and God to begin with? Its whole life is spent exchanging chemical and electrical signals with other neurons. On the fringes of speculative thinking, the mind is coming back into its own.

Instead of trying to rehabilitate the mind, we think it's more fruitful, and far bolder, to put the mind at the very center of reality. Nothing exists except in your own awareness. If you can't see, hear, touch, taste, and smell a thing, if you can't even think about it, the thing cannot exist. Yet even without a world of things, consciousness does exist, and it has enormous untapped potential. That was proven decades ago when physicists discovered the observer effect. Technically, the observer effect applies to light. Light can act like a wave or a particle, but not both at the same time. It defies ordinary logic, but Einstein and his colleagues discovered that light "decides" whether to act like a wave or particle depending on the observer.

Until it is observed, light exists in suspended animation, so to speak. It doesn't take the form of particle or wave until an observer tries to measure it. After that, there's no turning back. Whatever the observer sees is reality. This implies that observation is a creative act, and quantum physics has lived with that fact for two generations or more. Only for ordinary people, the observer effect hasn't had much to do with their lives.

Or has it?

Children who are raised under a disapproving eye, who are made to feel bad, worthless, and unlovable, are very likely to grow up to feel that way permanently. Isn't a judgmental parent a kind of observer, creating the very flaws he sees? On the other hand, children raised under a loving eye have a far greater chance of loving themselves and developing the good qualities seen in them. You can come up with many examples of how the observer effect might influence daily life.

But what if we are missing the forest for the trees? What if consciousness is creating much more than we suppose. It could be creating something as basic as time and space. At the quantum level, Nature isn't bound by either one. Not only is time relative, but certain phenomena travel faster than the speed of light, needing no time at all to cover billions of light years in distances. That, too, is well known in modern physics. But few thinkers have applied the same effect to the mind.

Here things get tricky. Let's say you are an observer. You watch an event unfold such as the action of light deciding whether to be a wave or a particle. Since your brain is composed of quantum interactions, it isn't a stable observer. Waves are watching waves, particles are observing particles. Which implies that your brain only "decides" to be a brain at the moment you perceive anything. This quirky notion drops us immediately into the quantum soup, where nothing is stable at all.

To get out of the soup, we need to know why time and space look so stable. I don't expect the room I'm sitting in to collapse a minute from now, and I don't expect my car to shoot off at the speed of light, even though photons and subatomic particles are the basis for my car and my room. The reason we have a stable sense of time and space isn't because they are "real," in the sense that time and space don't need an observer. They absolutely do, for without a mind, nothing exists but randomness and chaos at every level.

The mystery of how time and space become real is tied to the mystery of mind. Some cosmologists, looking at the evolution of the universe, can't tolerate randomness. They don't believe that the explosion of the Big Bang could create the complexity of DNA, any more than a hurricane blowing through a junkyard could create a 747 jetliner. It has been proposed that the visible universe is matched to our own minds. The events we observe that lead to our existence here on planet Earth are precisely the events that can be observed by the human mind. One can imagine life forms on other planets that see an entirely different universe, the one that led to their existence.

Calling an idea tricky doesn't make it absurd. This so-called "anthropic principle" rests upon an irrefutable basis: Nobody can observe anything that the mind isn't set up for. Silicone crystals may be vibrating in a language that sings and makes up poetry, but we have no means of eavesdropping since our minds can't conceive of minerals leading complex social and artistic lives. Now let's go a step further.

Instead of hogging the limelight by saying that the mind must be human, what if we posit that life is in charge of the universe? This was certainly true before the rise of science. The creation emanated from a living God, and since God was everywhere, life was everywhere. Science traditionally considered this a matter of faith rather than reason. They could point to atoms and molecules, amino acids and enzymes, proteins and primitive life forms, all the way from blue-green algae to human DNA. Isn't it obvious, they say, that life developed from non-life over billions of years?

Actually, no, The tracks of evolution are just that, footprints to show that something or someone has passed here. A radio playing Mozart is just such a footprint. It proves that Mozart once lived, but you can't tear apart the radio and find Mozart inside. You and I are the children of evolution, but only part of our evolution is visible; the rest, the most mysterious part, is invisible. Therein lies the answer to how we became masters of space and time.

(To be continued)

Published in the San Francisco Chronicle

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Why does bad news make us sad? Why does getting a raise make us want to celebrate? Not many people have thought about these questions. They seem too simple, yet in a way they are deeply mysterious. In fact, the right answer can set your body free, while the wrong answer can prove to be an inescapable trap.

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