EPISODE 43: DEEPAK CHOPRA
DEEPAK CHOPRA
On Formlessness, The Mystery Of Existence, and The Vast Expanse Of Consciousness That Is Us.
DEEPAK CHOPRA™ MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra, a modern-day health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. Chopra is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is the author of over 90 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. For the last thirty years, Chopra has been at the forefront of the meditation revolution and his 91st book, Total Meditation (Harmony Books) helps to achieve new dimensions of stress-free living and joyful living. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.”
Deepak Chopra’s Website
Deepak Chopra on Wikipedia
QUOTES FROM THIS EPISODE
4:36 ~ “I'm entering my fourth Ashrama and I'm beginning to experience what might be called a formlessness as my fundamental experience of reality. And so I'm slowly deconstructing all mental constructs, including the construct that we have a physical body or a mind.”
5:13 ~ “If I close my eyes, there's no physical world right now... but there is sound and there is sensation and there's bodily experience... what we call sensations and then what we call emotions that are still there. And then, thoughts are there and imagination is there. But there's no physical experience of the world. And when I close my eyes right now and I feel my body, there's no experience there either. So I feel formless. And this is very interesting, because when you know that you are formless, you can kind of in a way... you can morph into anything.”
15:55 ~ “We can never, never, ever mentally solve the mystery of existence.”
16:35 ~ “Every child is, in a sense, the mystery of the universe. And that mystery can't be solved. It cannot be solved. It is impossible to solve the mystery at the level of thought... so we shouldn't even try. And just feeling that - the love you feel... for your child - if you could see the world with those eyes, you would feel it for the whole world... In fact, you're given the gift to feel that experience for your child, so you would look at the world through those eyes.”
20:33 ~ “You look at all the other people in your family and particularly your ancestors - they're gone. And then you say, ‘I'm going to be gone, too.’ And then you say, ‘Who am I that is going to be gone?’ And you can't find a person... Who's Deepak? I can't find a Deepak, you know. So then... And one is, you go into despair - a deep, dark night of the soul. And I've experienced that. The second is, you say, ‘It's all meaningless - nihilistic.’ And that is even a deeper despair. And the third is, suddenly, for no reason whatsoever, you have spontaneous joy, spontaneous freedom... You know that there is truth. You know, there is goodness, beauty, harmony, love, compassion, joy, equanimity. It's your nature and you're at peace, because you've seen through the full constructs of birth and death.”
30:01 ~ “The fact that you have a body means that you're recycling karma - your internal dialog, your story. And also, you want your story to be validated and you want to cancel other people's stories. We are in a cancel culture anyway. So all the conflicts in the world are basically conflicts of stories.”
30:48 ~ “You slowly start to move in the direction where at least when you close your eyes, the body doesn't exist... And there's more peace. There's more equanimity. And that's not peace of mind because that's an oxymoron. The mind is never at peace.”
33:17 ~ “Yoga means union with the source of all existence, which includes your soul. So, you know, if you want to think of your body as the hardware and the world as a movie, which this projector is projecting, then your mind, intellect and ego is the software. But then there's coding... The coding is what gives rise to the software working into the expression of the movie or the song. The coding itself is what in traditional Vedanta is called Jiva - your soul, your individual soul, which is based on past memories, karma, desires, etc. but it's so coded that you're not aware of it... But it's the basis of both your internal dialog and the movie that we call Body, Mind and the World. The changing movie: Started with the fertilized egg, ends with death. If all goes well.”
36:37 ~ “The Law Of Intention simply recognizes that you attract, every second of your life, what is reflected by your state of awareness. Every second. Now, if you are in the stages of awareness where you are ready to have a very subtle intention and then let it go and then abide back in samadhi (transcendence)... then that intention organizes its own fulfillment through what we call synchronicity or grace.”
38:20 ~ “Method actors, what they did so successfully is: they were able to witness themselves, as if from a distance. So they were in the role, but also not in the role... That is a great actor... Actors naturally have a tendency - good ones - to witness themselves as if they are witnessing their whole performance as an audience... In spiritual traditions, it's called being the world and not of it. That's actually a stage of expansion of consciousness to Soul Consciousness: when you become the witness and then you're the witness even in waking, dreaming and sleeping, ultimately. And also you wake up to the bigger reality. This is a step in that direction. Actors somehow intuitively are there - the good ones.”
48:51 ~ “They say in the traditional Vedic traditions: ‘When you see yourself in another person or another being - even the dog or cat - that's love. And when you see yourself in the coffee cup, that's beauty. So it's all the same thing. Love, beauty and joy and oneness and knowing myself as the other and the other as myself is the same thing. It is your love.”
53:37 ~ “There are infinite universes that come and go in the vast expanse of consciousness, like motes of dust dancing in a beam of light. And you are the beam of light, actually, projecting these holomovements.”