With compassion and wisdom Dr. Deepak Chopra has emerged as a world leader in the field of body/mind medicine. Without abandoning his impeccable credentials in endocrinology and internal medicine he has successfully merged modern science and ancient knowledge of Ayurveda to create a holistic approach to health-care he calls Quantum healing. Quantum healing explores the relationship between man and nature, mind and body; it teaches how to restore balance in our physiologies, and how to reawaken our own inner healing mechanisms. Dr. Chopra lectures worldwide; his message takes us beyond the confines of the conditioned thinking to a realm where anything is possible.

Who are we?

The usual idea of who we are comes to us from the superstition of materialism. We usually think of ourselves as a physical body that has learned how to think, a kind of skin-encapsulated ego confined in flesh and bones, and lives in a span of the lifetime. This idea comes to us because we interpret our reality through our senses.  Our senses, we think, give us an accurate picture of the world. We have the idea that sensory experience is the crucial test of reality. If I can touch something, and taste it, and smell it, and see it, then it really exists; otherwise, it’s just in my imagination. And even from the common sense we know that it’s not true; our senses tell us that the Earth is flat, and nobody believes that anymore; our senses tell us that the Earth is stationary, and we know that it is spinning at a dizzying speed and moving through outer space at thousands miles an hour. Our senses tell us that something has certain color, texture, fragrance, and so on, but it turns out that it is not really its intrinsic nature; it is the response of the observer; it is how our senses decode something which is much vaster and abstract, it is our interpretation of reality.

99 % of all people, with possibly some exceptions, will take in their nervous systems less than one billionth of the stimuli that are present, and what will get in is your idea, your concept of what you think exists out there.  If you don’t have the concept, you won’t even perceive it, it doesn’t exist for you.  So, what we call reality is really a collection of our subjective experiences, if we happen to agree on those subjective experiences.

We look at our body as a frozen anatomical structure, when in fact the human body, and everything else in creation, is a river of intelligence, energy and information constantly renewing itself in every second of its existence. Our physical bodies are rivers of intelligence, and just as you cannot step into the same river twice because every time you step into it new water flows in, the real you cannot step into the same flesh and bones twice because in every second of your existence you are renewing your body. With every breath you inhale astronomical amounts of atoms from the universe which end up in your heart cells, and your brain cells, and your kidney cells, and so on. When you breathe out, you are breathing out atoms that are coming from every part of your body; you literally breathing out bits and pieces of your heart, and kidney, and brain tissue. Technically speaking, we are intimately sharing our organs with each other all the time. “Every atom belonging to you as well belongs to me.” This is not a poetic metaphor; it’s a fact of physiology. In fact, right this moment in a physical body we have millions atoms that once were in the bodies of Christ, or Moses, or Buddha, or Leonardo da Vinci. Think of anyone that has ever existed on this planet, and you have in your physical body atoms that once existed in that body. In just the last three weeks billions of atoms that have gone through your body have gone through the bodies of every living species on our planet: a peasant in China, a tree in Africa, a squarrel in Siberia. You replace almost your entire body in less than one year. (98% of all the atoms in your body are replaced in less than one year). You literally make a new liver every six weeks, and new skin once a month, and new stomach lining every five days, and a new skeleton every three months, and brain cells and even DNA cells are replaced every six weeks. In two years you replace your entire body down to the last atom.  Even if your physical body comes and goes, you as your thoughts, memories, emotions, feelings, desires, ideologies, all those things that make you, are constantly outliving your physical body.

The true nature of physical reality is that it is non-physical. All physical matter is ultimately made of subatomic particles that are moving at lightning speeds around huge empty spaces, and these particles themselves are not material objects. These particles are fluctuations of energy and information in a huge void of energy and information. The human body, or anything else that is physical, is proportionately as void as intergalactic space. If we could see the human body as it really is or anything else as it really is, we would see a huge empty void with some random electrical discharges. Everything physical is mostly empty space. Essential raw material of the universe, the stuff of which everything is made is non-stuff; and not only it is non-stuff, it is a thinking non-stuff.

A thought is an impulse of energy and information coming out from the same unified field that structures all the forces of nature that ultimately are experienced as physical reality. In other words, thought is a quantum event; it is a fluctuation in the unified field that transforms itself, as all quantum events do, into subatomic particles, which then arrange themselves into atoms, and then into molecules of matter, and ultimately physical world. And the physical body is part of that the world. Thought creates material reality.

Every thought (impulse of energy) translates into biochemical events -- molecules of neuropeptides are produced – “messengers from inner space”. Every cell of the body has receptors for neuropeptides, and so every cell of our bodies is affected by our thoughts. 

The body and the mind are inseparably one in every aspect of our physiologies.   Our minds extend outside our bodies. It is not that the mind is in the body, the body is in the mind, and the mind is in something much larger, which we call the spirit (soul), the field that is beyond body and mind.  We are neither physical body, nor the mind; we are the Eternal Spirit, the Consciousness, the Unified Field that creates everything. Consciousness is fundamental to matter and not the other way around.

The crucial difference between life and death of the physical body is the interpretation of a memory. We are constantly interpreting our memories. The average human thinks about sixty thousands thoughts a day.  About 95% of the thoughts you have today are the ones you had yesterday.  We have become bundles of conditioned reflexes constantly being triggered by people and circumstances into the same quantum events, the same biochemical reactions, the same behavioral outcomes, and ultimately the same life experiences.  We have become victims of the same repetitions of our memories. The irony is that my tormentor today is myself left over from yesterday.

Imagine a brick building, and you have the ability to change every brick in this building within a year. (This is what we do with our bodies; every atom in the body is replaced once a year). But you are stuck with the notion that there is only one way of doing it.

So, if we really replace our bodies once a year, than why do we still have the same problems?  The answer is: through conditioned response, through bondage to the known we initiate the same quantum events that result in the same outcomes.

See the world as if for the first time; see it through the eyes of a child and you will suddenly find that you are free, because bondage is nothing other than seeing the world through the camouflage of preconceived ideas, preconceived expectations, interpretations, labels, descriptions, evaluations, analysis -- through judgment. If you could see the world without judgment you would see it fresh, as infinite possibilities. What we need is to be free of the known; we need to step into the unknown in every second of our lives. The known is nothing other than the rigid patterns of past conditioning; it’s all the memories and burdens of the past; it is time bound awareness – awareness of the self-image.  But beyond the self-image is Self.

The Self has timeless awareness and its life is supremely concentrated in the present. When we escape the prison of conditioned thinking we escape the prison of time and space, where we squeeze ourselves in the volume of a body and a span of a lifetime.  That self-image, which is replacing the Self (Spirit) is nothing other than the Intellect (ego). All our problems are from “the mistake of the intellect”.

We are dimensionless, timeless Spirit. And it is a liberating piece of information. It makes us free. We are unbounded Spirit that is in every bit of creation (manifestation), and we have just chosen our bodies as a time-space event in the continuum of eternity. And just to have the restoration of that memory brings about wholeness.

The effortless nature of the path of knowledge: if it is genuine it cannot be through effort, because nature functions with effortless ease, the path of least resistance; it is the principle of “do less, accomplish more”, and ultimately “do nothing and accomplish everything”, just by being.

Deepak Chopra