Deepak Chopra and Intent

By Deepak Chopra
Senior Scientist, the Gallup Organization
Jim Clifton
CEO, the Gallup Organization

When they think of India, many people still have the shining image of it as a rising economy, one of the four most promising in the world, in fact. As one of the BRIC countries, along with Russia, Brazil and China, India’s rise from a long history of poverty raised hope for the rest of the developing world. So it’s startling when Fareed Zakaria recently asked on CNN, “Is India the broken BRIC?” In the same vein, Jim O’Neill, the most important global economist at Goldman Sachs, and the man who coined the term BRIC, considers India the biggest economic disappointment with its 5 percent fall in growth since 2010.

What makes the disappointment worse is that since the early 90s, as Western media and business people were jetting back and forth between India and China sizing up these two growing economic giants, business magazine covers, famous economists and top CEOs at conferences were saying, “India is the one to watch, not China.”

How did so many brilliant prognosticators miss so badly? As economists ponder what went wrong, the Gallup data gives telltale clues on the human side. Economics comes down to millions of individual workers and what they experience at work. The worker’s story from India is discouraging. A staggering 33 percent of employees are what Gallup scientists refer to as “actively disengaged,” meaning not only are they miserable at work, but they walk the halls and petition their colleagues to be as miserable and discontented as they are. On the positive end of the spectrum, a tiny 9 percent of Indian employees are engaged. These are the people who build new products and services, generate new ideas, create new customers and ultimately spur an economy to create more and more good jobs.

The workplace tends to be symptomatic of society as a whole, and here the picture is just as gloomy. India’s state of mind is severely troubled right now. Gallup’s World Poll, currently in its eighth year in the field, finds more Indians than ever are “suffering” – 31 percent — while fewer are “thriving,” just 10 percent. This is among the worst in the world.

When any society reaches a low point of well-being with a sizable number of people suffering, it is in trouble. When the quotient of suffering sharply rises (as it did in Libya before the Arab Spring and is happening today in Egypt), social turmoil often results. The street rioting over sexual harassment of women in India — an endemic problem that the government and judicial system turned a blind eye to for decades — is another warning sign.

What will happen next? Officially, India is being upbeat about its economic projections, with a forecast of growth between 6 and 7 percent for 2013 after falling below 7 percent for the past two years and generally underperforming since 2008, according to a recent story in the New York Times. In the Gallup data, 36 percent of the Indian population rated economic conditions as “good” or “excellent” in 2012, as compared to nearly half (46 percent) who thought so in 2008.

Of course, we are rooting for India’s economic uptick, but the human side needs deeper examination. In many ways India is facing a crisis of the soul. When only one person out of 10 is thriving, and around that number feel engaged at the workplace, it indicates that the vast majority are not reaching a desirable level of fulfillment — far from it.

A nation’s soul is the sum total of all interactions between all people in that society. Every moment lasts a few seconds and is positive, negative, or neutral. In those moments, people may make very tiny decisions that, as they accumulate, can profoundly change their day and even the rest of their lives. An old adage says, “Miss a bus, and you change the rest of your life.” In our world of unprecedented interconnectedness, that axiom may need updating: “Miss a bus and you change the rest of the world.” With India’s vast population, there are trillions of interactions per year. If they swing too far to the negative, the society’s soul is suffering a malaise.

Analysts point to large-scale problems, such as the widespread corruption that persists in Indian government, local and national, and the failure of reform parties to gain a strong political footing. But we think the story of moment-to-moment experience counts the most. What if every interaction with a bureaucrat brings expectations of obstacles, red tape or a bribe? What if every woman walking out alone expects catcalls, whistles and physical intrusions from men on the street? What if domestic violence and rape go hugely underreported and when reported lead to minimal consequences for the perpetrator?

India needs to come to terms with its soul sickness, and slowly, haltingly, it seems to be. Most Indians are lodged in the slot of low expectations. The Gallup data shows a surprising complacency, because despite the alarmingly low level of well-being, around 60 percent of Indians between 2006 and 2011 said that they were satisfied with their standard of living. The bubble seems to have burst since then, however, with that figure dipping below 50 percent in 2012.

There is something important here that India’s leaders — and all global leaders — must consider: A nation’s soul precedes its human development. Organic human development will not occur in India if the majority of everyday experiences are negative. Even so, India’s resilience and optimism — along with its resignation in the face of problems going back for generations — gives hope that the country will look to its soul. A great culture can only persist by doing so. We are pained to deliver gloomy news, but our deepest feeling is that the most spiritual nation on earth, and its largest democracy, can find a path to reform, with the well-being of its people held out as a primary goal.

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By Deepak Chopra, M.D., FACP
Murali Doraiswamy, MD, Professor of Psychiatry, Duke University Medical Center
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
Menas Kafatos, Ph.D., Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor in Computational Physics, Chapman University.

In our previous articles, we challenged a cherished point of view, that reality is material and external.  There is a world “out there” that that every baby plops into when it is born.  Convincing someone that this didn’t really happen is disturbing, and among scientists, whose worldview depends on the material world being real, hackles are raised as soon as you say otherwise.   But we aren’t straying outside science in the quantum era. Our basic point, that the physical world lost its reassuring status a hundred years ago when the quantum revolution began – is beyond dispute.

But the fact that every particle in the universe winks in and out of the quantum field, or that particles can transition into waves that spread in all directions doesn’t strike very close to home. Quantum physicists get into their cars every morning with no fear that the engine will vanish into a cloud of energy.  But this new, nonmaterial reality actually lies much closer than anyone supposes.  The human brain is where the quantum meets the road, with far-reaching implications.

What if there is physical evidence that the brain is a quantum device, and that its design reflects the cosmos in an uncanny way that cannot be by chance?  In the Vedic tradition of India, it is held that “as is the smallest, so is the greatest. As is the microcosm, so is the macrocosm.”  We’re using modern terminology, but the concept is timeless: Nature is coherent from its subtlest level to its grossest.  Some clues to this truth are visual – the helix that appears in DNA and in spiral nebulas, for example.  Hard science isn’t moved by casual resemblances, however.

To tighten the parallels, one can turn to recent work by physicists including Dmitri Krioukov and reported in mainstream journal like Nature’s Scientific Reports. To quote:  The “universe may be growing in the same way as a giant brain – with the electrical firing between brain cells ‘mirrored’ by the shape of expanding galaxies.”  Looking at simulations of galaxy interconnections in the early universe and neuron interconnections makes it virtually impossible to tell them apart. The brain and the cosmos, like the Internet, are networks, and they evolve the same way. The result, the authors argue, is that the universe really does grow like a brain. In a related article in the prestigious journal Science, researchers have discovered that the connections in the brain are highly organized, the brain’s structure is like a grid of city wiring, the neurons traversing in all directions.

Several years ago the philosopher Clark Glymour at Carnegie Mellon University published an intriguing paper titled “When is a brain like the planet?” He provocatively concluded that when it thinks, the brain parallels the ecology of our planet. A phenomenon like El Nino, which is coordinated with weather events far away in Africa, is similar time series correlations observed in an fMRI brain scan.  (Similarly, Greek seismologists at the University of Athens have concluded that the tremors before an earthquake are identical to the heart patterns before a heart attack.  )

The similarities in physical systems can be inexplicable. We ourselves noticed that the number of neurons in a brain (about 100 billion) is on the same order of magnitude as the number of trees on the Earth (estimated by NASA to be about 400 billion). In their actual physical appearance, neurons look like trees with a main trunks (axon) and branches (dendrites, which comes from the Greek word “Dendron” or tree). Neurons connect together in a tree-to-tree fashion as their branches nearly touch.  The life of a single neuron is as entangled with every other neuron as the trees in a rain forest. The number of synapses in different neurons (neurons come in many varieties) vary from around 1,000, to 200,000 for large Purkinje cells. Trees have branches that show a self-similar pattern from a few hundred to more than 100,000.

It‘s hard for a neuroscientist to look up at trees and not see even more intricate parallels. Trees receive “information” in the form of carbon dioxide, sunlight, and water to produce the oxygen that sustains life on Earth. Animals in turn produce carbon dioxide, which forms a feedback loop back to trees which are fed by it. In a sense oxygen and carbon dioxide, flowing through every living system, are like neurotransmitters. The synapses where brain activity occurs from neuron to neuron are organized through feedback, with one side feeding chemicals to the other.

The fact is that all systems seem to be self-organized, from the complex way that replicant RNA organizes a new strand of DNA to the way the brain produces a single picture of reality that organizes the firing of billions of neurons.  The constants that rule the evolution of the universe are so precise that stars are organized to live through definite, orderly stages, and the formation of galaxies from interstellar dust follows its own life cycle.

In recent decades it has become established that a single cell is a system, as is the brain, and the entire body – you are presiding over an entire ecology, and like planetary ecology, everything finds a delicate balance. The phenomenon of homeostasis is the body’s way of balancing hundreds of different functions (e.g., blood pressure, body temperature, the symphony of hormones coursing through the blood stream, digestion, respiration, and waking and sleeping). It strikingly mirrors planetary ecology and its living response to forces of balance and imbalance.  The Gaia hypothesis, which looks upon the Earth as a single organism, may well apply to our own bodies as cells in the body of the cosmos.

“As is the smallest, so is the greatest” has come full circle from ancient wisdom to modern science once we accept that every system is driven by feedback loops, homeostasis, and continuing self-organization. At this point, it is up to dissenters to prove that we aren’t inhabiting a living universe, tied into it by the most fundamental characteristics of biological systems.

If it seems too much to grant that the universe is a living organism, that point isn’t necessary. What we wanted to show in this article is that the material world isn’t primary but secondary. Without homeostasis, feedback loops, and self-organization drive every level of Nature – they are invisible and intangible.  Without them, the fine- tuned universe couldn’t exist, or the fine-tuned human brain.

There are further horizons to cross. Might it be that forests here on Earth are not only responsible for energy generation but also connect planetary consciousness to cosmic consciousness? This may not be just bold speculation. If indeed the universe behaves like a brain, then why wouldn’t it harbor universal consciousness? After all, if the “hardware” looks the same, then the “software” that creates coherence at every level might be the same.  Even though everyone uses phrases like “I’m making up my mind” and “My mind’s not very sharp today,” the “my” is only an assumption.

When you get out of the shower, you are wet; you don’t say, “This is my wet.”  General qualities aren’t individual. You can’t call the Earth’s atmosphere “my air.” In the same way, human pride in being able to think and reason may be a false assumption. The great quantum pioneer Erwin Schrödinger thought so:

There is obviously only one alternative, namely the unification of minds or consciousness…. [I]n truth there is only one mind.

The implication is that just as our bodies are cells in the body of the universe, our consciousness is immersed in the universal mind. But how would we go about validating this scientifically? Going beyond resemblances in Nature, systems give us a toehold –  studying the evolution of physical systems on Earth will tell us a lot about the evolution of the brain, and vice versa.

If the universe is encoded in the brain, then perhaps “insights” that scientists and philosophers have had in the past (breakthrough thoughts about reality) are not be so mysterious.  Einstein was astonished that relativity, a theory formulated in his mind, turned out to match Nature’s workings with incredible mathematical precision.  Such astonishment has evolved beyond amazement by now. The brain is now being examined in the light of quantum biology, and it is dawning that thinking involves quantum operations at the basis where ions exchange charges – thus exchanging information in a precise, even digital way – down to a finer level where “normal” interactions between particles ceases. People do unexpected, strange, weird, and spooky things – so do quanta.  If their weirdness is entangled with ours, there is more than resemblance, parallels, and coincidence. The same source is at work for stars, brains, and thinking.

Perhaps, we are all tapping into cosmic knowledge (the ultimate software), acting as a portal from one piece of hardware to another, from the brain to reality “out there.” Using the same build for the hardware, Nature has allowed us to enter our mental universe, only to discover the infinitude of the conscious universe.  Infinity is hard to think about, but happily, our brains keep evolving. Having evolved to the point that we can look “out there” and see incredible mathematical orderliness, we’ve reached the horizon where reality may reveal its true source.

(To be cont.)

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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), Menas C. Kafatos, Ph.D., Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor in Computational Physics, Chapman University,

It would be reassuring to most people to discover that the universe is constructed to favor life.  If the human race isn’t a freakish outcome of highly improbable chance events, we have every right to see the universe as our home. But this psychological reassurance strikes physicists and biologists as wishful thinking – the bulwark of modern science, from the most minuscule events at the quantum scale to the Big Bang itself, is the assumption that creation is random, without guidance, plan, mind, or purpose.

Only very slowly has such a blanket view been challenged, but these new challenges are among the most exciting possibilities in science. We’d like to outline the argument for a “human universe” with an eye to understanding why the human race exists. This question is too central to be left to a small cadre of professional cosmologists and evolutionary biologists– everyone has a personal stake in it.

The most accepted theory of the large-scale structure of the universe is big bang cosmology, which has achieved impressive results. Yet when you try to model the universe, you can’t escape the problems surrounding what seems like a simple act: observing it.  Measuring the cosmos is intricately interwoven with limits imposed by the process of observation itself. As you go back in time or ahead into the future, as you reach so far into space that light takes billions of years to reach Earth,  any possible model encounters horizons of knowledge at some ultimate, faint observational limit. Beyond such a horizon, not just observation is blocked, but so is physics, mathematics, and the human mind.

For example, with the big bang theory, light cannot be used to observe further back in time or across immense distances to arrive close to the very beginning itself. The first instant of the big bang remains forever hidden from the present. Knowledge about the early universe has to be inferred, as indeed. We can examine the parts that scattered after the big bang, but we cannot grasp the whole. As such, our observational limitations prohibit verifying cosmological theories to any degree of accuracy for any observational test. So the Hubble telescope, marvelous as it is for sending back photos of distant galaxies, can’t reveal reality independent of cosmological theory.  Theory cannot be verified with complete certainty, which means that important topics like the expansion of the universe and the evolution of galaxies are our own mental constructs – they reflect who we are as observers, not independent reality. 

Fine Tuning in Cosmology

What science can see and infer about space and time is certainly fascinating. We want to touch upon the inexplicable fact that the cosmos fits together with the smallest and largest aspects fine-tuned beyond anything that pure chance can explain. Talking about this fine tuning is done mathematically, in a language beyond the reach of non-scientists.  Yet as soon as anyone ventures to suggest a creation that departs from randomness, two bad things happen. Religionists leap into the breach with God, and in reaction scientists become hotly defensive. We aren’t out to add to either of these bad things.  But we can’t ignore the human implications of what we’re about to discuss, because God and science will both be forced to take new shapes.

The most basic aspect of fine tuning is the consistency of the cosmos, which is the smoothest of cream soups compared with lumpy oatmeal. The universe we observe is essentially flat, which has given rise to the Flatness Problem. Being nearly flat today, the universe must have been exactly flat close to the time of the big bang itself, to one part in 10⁵⁰  (10 followed by 50 zeros, an unimaginable vast number). Why?  The usual interpretation proposed in the 80’s is that early on the universe was in an inflationary state, washing out any departures from flatness on extremely short time scales of 10^-35 sec. (Imagine one of those whirling paintings sold at carnivals, with the colors swirling outward with incredible force – not a single drop would leap up off the paper.) In more general terms, it would appear that the universe followed the simplest possible theoretical construct (flatness) in its large-scale geometry.

The inflationary model was developed to account for the flatness of the universe and also supposedly solves the horizon problem.  That problem arose because , looking in all directions, the universe is remarkably homogeneous, as related to the microwave background radiation that fills it  — the temperature of this radiation is constant if one looks at different parts of the sky, to 1 part in 10⁶ .  Such consistency isn’t easy to explain. Observations indicate that the background radiation filling all space was emitted around 100,000 years after the beginning, meaning that opposite sides of the sky at that time were, separated by approximately 10,000,000 light years. How could two opposite parts of the sky be so similar to each other if information had no chance to get from one to the other? Imagine a hot pancake fresh off the griddle that you tear into pieces and fling into the air.  A hundred thousand years later, all the pieces have the same temperature as one another, even though they never came into contact again – this is like the horizon problem.

Yet the biggest fine tuning is the value of the so-called cosmological constant, introduced by Einstein as part of general relativity to keep the universe stable and not collapse back on itself. The idea was proposed before Edwin Hubble discovered the expansion of the universe, which then presented a dynamic cosmos, without the need to keep it stable. Einstein later called the cosmological constant his biggest blunder. Today we don’t believe it was a blunder. The cosmological constant is a value to describe the density of energy everywhere in empty space. Such constants, like gravity and the speed of light, are necessary for the mathematical computations of physics to work.  In this case, we are talking about the dark energy in empty space that cannot be seen.

In recent decades the cosmological constant has been reintroduced because current observations seem to indicate that the universe not only is expanding but is also accelerating in its expansion. The standard model of particle interactions predicts a value that is 10¹²² larger than the actual observed value. Had the value been what standard particle theory predicts, the universe could not exist in its present form.  This is known as the Cosmological Constant Problem

This last has shaken our confidence that we can rely upon observation in the normal sense if we want to grasp what the universe is. Regular matter (i.e., atoms and molecules) contributes 4% or less of the enclosed density of the universe right now. As such, if one insists on exact flatness, one needs to introduce unknown forms of “dark matter” (around 25%) and “dark energy (around 70%) to make a flat universe.  Worse still for cosmologists, unknown physics is required by a non-zero cosmological constant. The mathematical model for a flat universe is simple in its initial assumptions but the underlying physics required to maintain it is complex and even unknown.

Let’s translate the dilemma into everyday terms. Only 4% of the universe – meaning all the stars, galaxies, planets, light, heat, and interstellar dust - fits into science.  We are perched as if on the cherry that tops an ice cream sundae, trying to make the whole dessert conform to being like a cherry, since that’s the only world we know. But the universe refuses to be a cherry, and what it insists on being may be inconceivable. For unlike a bacterium that may have floated on to the top of an ice cream sundae through the air, we were born on the cherry, are made of its substance, and can think only in terms of our small specific surroundings.

Yet fine tuning has always lurked on the edges of standard physics, being ignored only because for a century, observation was triumphant, carrying theory along with it. You can do wonders with subatomic particles, relativity, and quantum calculations before you have to worry about events that occurred over 13 billion years ago. The universe “as it presents itself” was good enough, as it has been for a long, long time. But the numbers are inescapable, and on every side they point to a universe that is fine-tuned at the smallest and largest levels.  An ancient Indian proverb can be put in modern terms:  “As is the large, so is the small. As is the microscopic, so is the macroscopic.”

This similarity defies randomness.  Pure chance is the clumsiest, most inelegant, and least probable way to explain a fine tuned cosmos, which means that it isn’t good science.  In an ironic twist, the numbers game of modern physics has revealed that the numbers match too well.  It’s like a bingo game where the machine spits out the same ball millions of times in a row. How can that be? More importantly, why is creation fit together seamlessly? We’ll look for plausible answers in the next post.

(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” and my degree to 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)

Menas C. 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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Modern society has done much to ravage the environment, and by now there is a numbing effect.  When PBS recently ran a program on how the oceans are dying, who could watch without a sinking heart? Besides feeling gloomy and guilty, however, there’s a deeper sense that Nature has turned against us. Has it, and if so, why? The question only makes sense if you have a belief that human beings are intimately connected to Nature.

That belief is centuries old, when humans first conceived of Nature as our mother and provider.  There was no question that the earth had been provided to the human race as a unique privilege and blessing. The Book of Genesis explicitly puts Adam and Eve In charge of all creatures, but the same sense of dominance infuses all cultural traditions.  Nature existed as our home, rich with abundance, caring for our needs, and endless in its resources.

Now we live in a scientific age when it seems naïve to humanize Nature; instead, we assume that the ecology is totally indifferent to us, a neutral system whose forces control weather, climate, temperature, and atmosphere strictly according to the laws of physics.  I’m not suggesting that this impersonal view must be returned to the intimacy of Nature as our mother, but at the same time, there’s no escaping the fact that like our ancestors, we still view the planet as our home, depending on it for air, water, nourishment, and all natural resources.

Without resorting to mythology, our view of Nature must be intimate, because in a very real way the breathing of the forests is an extension or our breath, its rivers and oceans the source of our bloodstream, its life forms an extension of everything we eat and digest.  No relationship could be closer. In fact, everything Nature does, we do to ourselves. Nature makes us as fortunate or doomed as we see ourselves. In the past, the endless abundance of Nature was like a mother who holds her child’s hand on the way to school, protecting it from any sense of lack, threat, or abandonment. Now Nature has let our hand go – we are free from many threats, yet we are responsible for ourselves, like any child who determines his own future.

At this moment, any society that turns its back on perils to the planet is acting like a child who won’t let go of Mother. The advanced countries are throwing a tantrum, lavishly throwing resources around and tearing the room apart, while rising societies blindly try to imitate this behavior as quickly as possible.  In both cases, the underlying psychology is one of denial. We keep hoping we can remain protected, privileged, and free of danger. This form of wish fulfillment is based on desperation and deep-seated fear.

Even the realists among us who aren’t acting like children feel the same fear, but if we can overcome our shock at how rapidly and ferociously Nature seems to have turned against us, there’s another way to perceive the situation. When Nature took care of human beings as if resources were endless, we based on happiness on that assumption. Our new relationship to Nature implies a different kind of happiness, not one that is worse but different.

It is possible to be very happy without constant growth, reckless waste, ignoring Nature’s limitations, and denying what lies ahead in the future.  The key is to exchange quantity for quality.  With few exceptions, every family lives on limited resources, so making this our planetary psychology comes naturally – we only have to make a shift away from our unrealistic extravagance.  Without a shift in consciousness, the environment will continue to deteriorate, but what I find hopeful is that each person can make the shift now, which is how all social change occurs.   Improving the quality of your life is a primary goal in the first place.  That part isn’t new. But instead of pretending you are on a luxury ocean liner, your model can be a small, self-enclosed boat where every inch counts and resources are limited. I don’t find that a gloomy image. The spiritual teacher J. Krishnamurti told the truth decades ago when he pointed out that the physical necessities of life are, after all, quite modest – a decently comfortable shelter, warm clothes, and a modicum of food. There’s no use pretending that adding more and more leads to a higher state of happiness. It doesn’t.  Each person learns as much if they look at their own lives.   Somewhere in the future we will learn the same as a planet.

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