Advertisement
We all know the complaints: family grievances, stressful shopping, never enough time to get everything done, fatigue and collapse. Therapists brace themselves for the holidays as depressed patients become more depressed, addictive patients become more addicted and winter grayness casts its pall.
For more information go to deepakchopra.com
Follow Deepak on Twitter
If you've ever used Google Alert, you know the jolts it can deliver. Whenever anyone in the blogosphere decides to blow a poison dart your way, Google is happy to deliver the news, along with the more positive mentions, of course. Most of my stinging darts come from skeptics. Over the years I've found that ill-tempered guardians of scientific truth can't abide speculative thinking. And as the renowned Richard Dawkins has proved, they are also very annoyed by a nuisance named God.
Statistically, cynical mistrust is correlated with premature sudden death from cardio vascular disease. Since the skeptics who write venomous blogs trust in nothing, I imagine that God will outlive them. In the interests of better health, these people should read scripture, or at least a poem, twice a day. Doctor's orders.
I've debated skeptics, including Richard Dawkins (I spoke with Dawkins for over 90 minutes on camera in Oxford. He extracted 30 seconds from the dialogue and dubbed me the enemy of science.) and I am amazed that they mistake self-righteousness for happiness. A sort of bitter satisfaction is what they reap. No skeptic, to my knowledge, ever made a major scientific discovery or advanced the welfare of others. Typically they sit by the side of the road with a sign that reads "You're Wrong" so that every passerby, whether an Einstein, Gandhi, Newton, or Darwin, can gain the benefit of their illuminated skepticism. For make no mistake, the skeptics of the past were as eager to shoot down new theories as they are to worship the old ones once science has validated them.
It never occurs to skeptics that a sense of wonder is paramount, even for scientists. Especially for scientists. Einstein insisted, in fact, that no great discovery can be made without a sense of awe before the mysteries of the universe. Skeptics know in advance -- or think they know -- what right thought is. Right thought is materialistic, statistical, data-driven, and always, always, conformist. Wrong thought is imaginative, provisional, often fantastic, and no respecter of fixed beliefs.
So whenever I find myself labeled the emperor of woo-woo, I pull out the poison dart and offer thanks that wrong thinking has gotten us so far. Thirty years ago no right-thinking physician accepted the mind-body connection as a valid, powerful mode of treatment. Today, no right-thinking physician (or very few) would trace physical illness to sickness of the soul, or accept that the body is a creation of consciousness, or tell a patient to change the expression of his genes. But soon these forms of wrong thinking will lose their stigma, despite the best efforts of those professional stigmatizers, the skeptics.
Published in the San Francisco Chronicle
Where do you get your energy? Until you know the answer, your sources of energy will be limited. Food can only supply so many calories, and quite often, if those calories come from fat or sugar, there is actually a falling off or dulling of energy. If your energy comes from being with people, you won't be energized when you are alone. If your energy comes from working, it will last much longer and be more renewable but eventually bring fatigue.
Read entire article at Oprah.com
For more information go to deepakchopra.com
Follow Deepak on Twitter
Q: What do you think of the American Humanist Association's new "Godless Holiday" campaign? The ads will say: "No God? . . . No Problem! Be good for goodness' sake. Humanism is the idea that you can be good without a belief in God.
The trouble with renunciation is that it is so absolute. Throwing God out of Christmas can't be a completely good idea or completely bad one. Consider the temperance movement. A hundred years ago the teetotalers equated drink with the Devil, and "taking the pledge" in writing displayed a willingness to be saved. The culmination of the movement took place with Prohibition, when a whole nation was forced to take the pledge, whether they liked it or not.
In reality, alcohol can be put to good and bad uses. The bad may far outweigh the good, and perhaps "good" needs to be in quotation marks. But I doubt that anyone has ever been lost or saved by accepting God or renouncing Him (or Her). God is a projection of human aspirations; God is also a projection of human guilt and a sense of sin. The two aspects have never been unraveled. To me, the unraveling must be done, but organized religion often blocks the way. Millions of people learn that they are sinners as children and carry the same crippling conviction for decades, to their deathbeds.
Humanism isn't the same as atheism. To that extent, the American Humanist Association has co-opted a word and distorted it for their own purposes. Even so-called secular humanism, a distortion by the religious right, doesn't preclude a deep desire to be a spiritual seeker. Indeed, the more humanist you are, the more you care about the human condition, and that proves to be fertile ground for spiritual aspirations. I'd rather follow a troubled agnostic who wants to raise his consciousness than a smug religionist who knows all the answers because he memorized them from the pulpit (or mosque, synagogue, and temple).
Humanists travel under an 18th-century banner, held aloft by Thomas Jefferson and other founding fathers, that reads "The proper study of mankind is man." If we include women and understand that human nature extends to the depths of the soul, there's nothing incompatible between humanism and religion. I sympathize with anyone who has suffered from religious intolerance and close-mindedness. There's ample reason to be repelled by organized religion. Yet nothing is absolute, and throwing God out of the holidays isn't right. God stands for all our spiritual aspirations, and we forget them far too often the rest of the year.
Published in the Washington Postl
For more information go to deepakchopra.com
Follow Deepak on Twitter
Subscribe
Add to Del.icio.us
Add to Technorati
Add to Digg
Add to Newsvine
Add to Facebook
Add to StumbleUpon