Part 2 Mystery and Magic:

(An attempt to understand some lectures by Dr. Depok Chopra, with apologies to him and to any person whom I have misquoted or whose name I have misspelled.)

The body, mind, and environment are all part of a network of energy and information. They come from a preexistent level of unity which can be experienced as love. We can have experience of the unity continuum. Time is a perceptual experience...the result of internal dialogue. Some scientists have set out to understand this continuum... to understand the mind of God. Steven Hawking, David Bohm, Albert Einstein are a few of these men. Einstein once said, "I want to know God's thoughts. The rest are details."


Hawkings tells us that we live in a universe with no beginning or end in time, and no edges. It is impossible for us to conceptualize or visualize this. If we compromise to a beginning, then we must ask what was before. If we visualize an ending, then we ask what is after the end. Or what is beyond the edge if there is an edge? It is stranger than we can think. Math, which is in a sense the language of nature, gives us the concepts of zero and infinity. But still we struggle with these.


There were some minors trapped in mine. Only one had a watch. Every two hours he would call out that one hour had passed. When they were finally rescued, all of them survived except the man with the watch. He had changed their subjective experience of time, but not his own. Subjective experience cannot be measured. It lies within the quantum realm of consciousness.


The physical world, including our bodies, is a response of the observer. In their essential state our bodies are composed of energy and information. The mind and body are inseparably one. The biochemistry of the body is a product of awareness.


We live in an infinite quantum soup. Like King Midas, in our waking state of consciousness, we leave aside vast expanses of awareness. Another Indian poet said, "Infinite worlds come and go in the vast expanse of my consciousness. They are like (particles) of dust dancing in beams of light shining through the hole in the roof."


In our waking state, we don't know the true texture of quantum reality. When we turn to perceive it, we break it up into material time bound reality. It becomes a response of the observer...how to use the body, the energy and information.


Dr Chopra had a poster with these words:

Perception appears to be automatic, but in fact it is a learned phenomenon.
Impulses of intelligence create your body in new forms every second.
Although each person seems separate and independent, all of us are connected to patterns of intelligence that govern the whole cosmos.

Our bodies sensors take the energy of the universe and convert it. They are transducers. There are floods of hormones, fluxes of chemicals, and this is how we metabolize sensory experience. We generate a field from response. We get a flash of energy or toxic chemicals, positive or negative, depending on our response to the stimulus. There is a field beyond body and mind. We learn how to perceive. It is an indoctrination...impulses of intelligence. There are no well defined edges. We are localizations in a field of energy and information which feeds back onto itself and influences our expression. Evolution is the ability to change our expression of energy and information. We live in an intelligent universe. It is conscious. The universe is becoming more conscious through you and me. This is a privilege. We are not separate.


Time does not exist as an absolute, but only as eternity.
Time is quantified eternity - timelessness. Time is chopped up into seconds, minutes, hours, days, years by us.
But each of us inhabits a reality lying beyond all change.
We need not be "victims" of aging, sickness, and death.


Every atom that belongs to you also belongs to me. They circulate and recycle throughout the vast field of the universe. Time is quantified energy. Buddha said, "This lifetime of ours is a flash of lightening in the sky. It is as transient as autumn clouds. To watch the birth and death of beings is like watching the movement of a dance. It rushes by like a torrent down a steep mountain."


We identify with the ego, not the Self. Self is the component of existence beyond change...soul or spirit. There is no scientific proof of its existence. All we have to go on is circumstantial evidence. Thoughts are the animating force. Soul or spirit cannot be scientifically documented.


What is the soul? It is the animating force of life. If it leaves, the body will disintegrate. A scientist named Penfield asks (along with many of us) where is the thinker of thoughts? Who is the thinker of thoughts? Who experiences the body, the mind, and the world?


If doctors stimulate parts of the brain in surgery, the patient will experience memory. Patients have been able to know that they were in surgery, and yet have the experience of the memory at the same time. They have two experiences at once. There is some detached observer experiencing the hallucination/reality. Who is the choice maker, the interpreter...the thinker of the thought, not the thought itself? Why can't we find it in the body? Chopra jokingly says that I (the soul) am not really here. I am an out of body experience. The question is how do we get an "in body experience"?


Spiritual literature, or bodies of literature that give rise to religions and to cultural heritage, say that we are in the world but not of it. If Beethoven is on the radio, and you tear up the radio looking for him, you will not find him there. The radio is an instrument that traps energy and information from a non-local field and transforms it into a space/time event. A space/time event is any event that has location in space and exists in moments of time. The physical body is in the continuum of space/time. It has a beginning and an end. Time is a way of measuring space. Space is a way of measuring time. The real you is not local and not trapped in space/time. The body is an instrument for the real you to experience the space/time continuum.


Rumi Sufi stated, "You are unconditioned spirit trapped in conditions like the sun in eclipse. When I die, I shall soar with angels. But when I die as an angel, what I shall become you can not imagine."


Ancient tradition says of the soul that fire cannot burn it, water cannot wet it, it has no beginning or ending or edges. This is close to the description of the universe by Hawkings quoted earlier. Science and spirituality speak of the same things. "Where am I?" then is the wrong question. It implies location in time and space. The closest we can get to access to this "thinker" is the silent spaces between thoughts. The space between thoughts contains the thinker. Some of the characteristics of the thinker are that "it" is silent and that "it" exists in a field of infinite possibility and potential. "It" has the ability and the freedom to choose.


Is it possible that there is only one thinker within the whole cosmos? There is a difference between us...we don't make the same choices. Each of us has a different probability amplitude which defines the statistical likelihood of the next space/time event (thought ,action, experience). What gives rise to it? Indian religion suggests that it is karma. Karma is the ultimate affirmation of free will and choice. Karma is action. Action generates memory, which is the basis of desire, which generates action again. This is the software of the soul. It runs the machinery of the self. We metabolize different experiences, and that is what makes us different. To become aware of this process is to become free of it. If we recognize the process then we can use memories, but they will not use us. The soul uses the software in a field of energy. It transforms the energy to biochemistry to experience the world.


There is one continuum...one non-local reality precipitating space/time events. Scientists like Pribram and Bohm have developed a paradigm called the holographic model. Within that paradigm each tiny part contains the whole pattern. The holographic model can be applied to the universe, or it can be applied to the individual. They suggest that each of us has holographic qualities. There are holograms of the self. Each tiny part of me contains all of me. All of the body is in every part of it. They also suggest that holograghic memory is in the body. According to this model, not only do we have personal memory, which goes back eons of time, but each of us is a hologram of the entire universe...personal and impersonal. In birth we replicate the experience of the reptile, amphibian, etc...everything that has happened down through time. The one having the experience, the timeless factor in every time bound experience...that's who we are.


That is the basis of healing, or wholeness. We must return to the memory of wholeness. When you remember who you really are, then you are healed. There is no fear. Part of you transcends mortality and time. The real you is beyond space and time. The Veda says...as is the atom, so is the universe; as is the microcosm, so is the macrocosm; as is the human body, so is the cosmic body; as is the human mind, so is the cosmic mind.


What is the Cosmic mind? We could say that it is a non-local field of energy and information with self referral cybernetic feedback loops. We could say that the soul is a continuum of probability amplitudes through which this non-local field is manifesting holographically as space/time events. William Blake says, "...to see the whole world in a grain of sand, heaven in a wild flower, infinity in the palm of your hand, eternity in an hour." This is a holographic description.


We are the same being in different disguises. We can know it experientially through the sacred experience. It is like the ancient Indian metaphor of Indras pearls. You gaze upon this vast web of pearls and see each pearl in all the pearls, and all the pearls in each of them. We need to redefine healing. There is a loss of fear of change when we discover the part of ourselves that is beyond change.