Deepak Chopra.
"How to Know G.o.d: The Soul"s Journey Into the Mystery of Mysteries"
In what concerns divine things, belief is not appropriate.
Only certainty will do.
Anything less than certainty is unworthy of G.o.d.
-SIMONE WEIL
One.
A REAL AND.
USEFUL G.o.d.
G.o.d has managed the amazing feat of being worshiped and invisible at the same time. Millions of people might describe him as a white-bearded father figure sitting on a throne in the sky, but none could claim to be an eyewitness. Although it doesn"t seem possible to offer a single fact about the Almighty that would hold up in a court of law, somehow the vast majority of people believe in G.o.d-as many as 96 percent, according to some polls. This reveals a huge gap between belief and what we call everyday reality. We need to heal this gap.
What would the facts be like if we had them? They would be as follows.
Everything that we experience as material reality is born in an invisible realm beyond s.p.a.ce and time, a realm revealed by science to consist of energy and information. This invisible source of all that exists is not an empty void but the womb of creation itself. Something creates and organizes this energy. It turns the chaos of quantum soup into stars, galaxies, rain forests, human beings, and our own thoughts, emotions, memories, and desires. In the pages that lie ahead we will see that it is not only possible to know this source of existence on an abstract level but to become intimate and at one with it. When this happens, our horizons open to new realities. We will have the experience of G.o.d.
After centuries of knowing G.o.d through faith, we are now ready to understand divine intelligence directly. In many ways this new knowledge reinforces what spiritual traditions have already promised. G.o.d is invisible and yet performs all miracles. He is the source of every impulse of love. Beauty and truth are both children of this G.o.d. In the absence of knowing the infinite source of energy and creativity, life"s miseries come into being. Getting close to G.o.d through a true knowing heals the fear of death, confirms the existence of the soul, and gives ultimate meaning to life.
Our whole notion of reality has actually been topsy-turvy. Instead of G.o.d being a vast, imaginary projection, he turns out to be the only thing that is real, and the whole universe, despite its immensity and solidity, is a projection of G.o.d"s nature. Those astonishing events we call miracles give us clues to the workings of this ineffable intelligence. Consider the following story.
In 1924 an old French villager is walking home. With one eye lost in the Great War and the other severely damaged by mustard gas in the trenches, he can barely see. The setting sun is bright, so the old man is completely unaware of the two youths on bicycles who have wheeled around the corner and are barreling down on him.
At the moment of impact an angel appears. He takes the lead bicycle by its two wheels, lifts it a few feet in the air, and sets it down safely on the gra.s.s beside the road. The second bicycle stops short, and the youths become tremendously excited. "There are two! There are two!" one of them shouts, meaning that instead of just the old man alone, two figures are standing in the road. The entire village becomes very worked up, claiming afterward that the youths were drunk or else they made up this fantastic tale. As for the old man, when he is asked about it, he says he doesn"t understand the question.
Could we ever come to an answer ourselves? As it happens, the old man was a priest, Pere Jean Lamy, and the appearance of the angel has come down to us through his own testimony before his death. Lamy, who was saintly and beloved, seems to be credited with many instances where G.o.d sent angels or other forms of divine aid. Although reluctant to talk about them, his att.i.tude was matter-of-fact and modest. Because of Lamy"s religious vocation, it is easy to dismiss this incident as a story for the devout.
Skeptics would not be moved.
Yet I am fascinated simply by whether it could have happened, whether we can open the door and allow helpful angels into our reality, along with miracles, visions, prophecy, and ultimately that great outsider, G.o.d himself.
We all know that a person can learn about life without religion. If I took a hundred newborn babies and filmed every moment of their lives from beginning to end, it wouldn"t be possible to predict that the believers in G.o.d will turn out to be happier, wiser, or more successful than the nonbelievers. Yet the video camera cannot record what is happening below the surface. Someone who has experienced G.o.d may be looking on the entire world with wonder and joy. Is this experience real? Is it useful to our lives or just a subjective event, full of meaning to the person having it but otherwise no more practical than a dream?
One bald fact stands at the beginning of any search for G.o.d. He leaves no footprints in the material world. From the very beginning of religion in the West, it was obvious that G.o.d had some kind of presence, known in Hebrew as Shekhinah. Sometimes this word is simply translated as "light"
or radiance. Shekhinah formed the halos around angels and the luminous joy in the face of a saint. It was feminine, even though G.o.d, as interpreted in the Judeo-Christian tradition, is masculine. The significant fact about Shekhinah was not its gender, however. Since G.o.d is infinite, calling the deity He or She is just a human convention.(*) Much more important was the notion that if G.o.d has a presence, that means he can be experienced.
He can be known. This is a huge point, because in every other way G.o.d is understood to be invisible and untouchable. And unless some small part of G.o.d touches the material world, he will remain inaccessible forever.
We personify G.o.d as a convenient way of making him more like ourselves. He would be a very perverse and cruel human, however, to remain so hidden from us while demanding our love. What could possibly give us confidence in any kind of benevolent spiritual Being when thousands of years of religion have been so stained by bloodshed?
We need a model that is both part of religion yet not bounded by it. The following simple, three-part scheme fits our common-sense view of G.o.d.
Shaped like a reality sandwich, this scheme can be pictured as follows: G.o.d
----- TRANSITION ZONE -----
Material world
The picture is not new in its top and bottom layers, placing G.o.d above the material world and removed from it. G.o.d must be separate from us, or else we would be able to see him here, strolling about as he did in the Book of Genesis. There, after the seven days of creation, G.o.d walked in the garden of Eden, enjoying his handiwork in the cool of the evening.
Only the middle element of our diagram, called the transition zone, is new or unusual. A transition zone implies that G.o.d and humans meet on common ground. Somewhere miracles take place, along with holy visions, angels, enlightenment, and hearing the voice of G.o.d. All of these extraordinary phenomena bridge two worlds: They are real and yet they are not part of a predictable cause-and-effect. To put it another way, if we stubbornly cling to material reality as the only way to know anything, skepticism about G.o.d is totally justified. Miracles and angels defy reason, and even though holy visions may be catalogued time after time, the rational mind remains defiant, defending its sure grip on the material plane.
"You really think G.o.d exists? Well, let"s break it down. You"re a doctor, I"m a doctor. Either G.o.d is causing these diseases we see every day, or else he can"t do anything to stop them. Which one is the G.o.d you want me to accept?"
This voice is from a skeptical colleague I used to make rounds with in the hospital, a confirmed atheist.
"I don"t want you to accept either one," I would protest.
But he would press the point. "Reality is reality. We don"t have to argue over whether an enzyme or hormone is real, do we? G.o.d can"t survive any kind of objective test. But we all know that. Some of us just choose not to keep on fooling ourselves."
On one level he was right. Materialist arguments against G.o.d remain powerful because they are based on facts, but they fall apart once you dive deeper than the material world. Dame Julian of Norwich lived in England in the fourteenth century. Dame Julian asked G.o.d directly why he had created the world. The answer came back to her in ecstatic whispers: You want to know your lord"s meaning in what I have done? Know it well, love was his meaning. Who reveals it to you? Love. What did he reveal to you? Love. Why does he reveal it to you? For love.
For Dame Julian G.o.d was something to eat, drink, breathe, and see everywhere, as though she were an infatuated lover. Yet since the divine was her lover, she was elevated to cosmic heights, where the whole universe was "a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand."
When saints go almost mad with rapture, we find their expressions both baffling and yet very understandable. Although we have all gotten used to the absence of the sacred, we appreciate that journeys into the transition zone, the layer closer to G.o.d, continue to happen.
The experience of G.o.d feels like flying. It feels as if I"m walking above the ground with such equilibrium that nothing can sway me from my path.
It"s like being the eye of the storm. I see without judgment or opinion. I just watch as everything pa.s.ses in and out of my awareness like clouds.
(1).
This uplifting experience, which is common to saints and mystics, is the record of a quantum journey. There are no known physical mechanisms that trigger it, yet feeling close to G.o.d occurs in every age, among all peoples. We"re all capable of going beyond our material bonds, yet we often fail to value this ability. Although we hear in church or temple or mosque that G.o.d is love, he doesn"t seem to exert much pa.s.sionate attraction anymore.
I don"t believe saints and mystics are really so different from other human beings. If we look at our reality sandwich, the transition zone turns out to be subjective: This is where G.o.d"s presence is felt or seen.
Anything subjective must involve the brain, since it takes millions of neurons firing together before you can have any experience.
Now our search has narrowed down in a way that looks very promising: G.o.d"s presence, his light, becomes real if we can translate it into a response of the brain, which I will call the "G.o.d response." We can get even more specific. Holy visions and revelations aren"t random. They fall into seven definite events taking place inside the brain. These responses are much more basic than your beliefs, but they give rise to beliefs. They bridge from our world to an invisible domain where matter dissolves and spirit emerges: 1. Fight-or-flight response: the response that enables us to survive in the face of danger. This response is linked to a G.o.d who wants to protect us. He is like a parent who looks out for the safety of a small child. We turn to this G.o.d because we need to survive.
2. Reactive response: this is the brain"s creation of a personal ident.i.ty. Beyond mere survival, everyone pursues the needs of "I, me, mine." We do this instinctively, and from this response a new G.o.d emerges, one who has power and might, laws and rules. We turn to this G.o.d because we need to achieve, accomplish, and compete.
3. Restful awareness response: the brain can be active or at rest, and this is its response when it wants peace. Rest and activity alternate in every part of the brain. The divine equivalent is a G.o.d who brings peace, who enables us to find a calm center in the midst of outward chaos. We turn to this G.o.d because we need to feel that the outer world isn"t going to swallow us up in its endless turmoil.
4. Intuitive response: the brain looks for information both inside and out. Outer knowledge is objective, but inner knowledge is intuitive. No one checks with an expert outside themselves before saying "I am happy" or "I am in love." We rely on our ability to know ourselves from the inside out. The G.o.d that matches this response is understanding and forgiving. We need him to validate that our inner world is good.
5. Creative response: the human brain can invent new things and discover new facts. This creative ability apparently comes from nowhere-the unknown simply gives birth to a new thought. We call this inspiration, and its mirror is a Creator who made the whole world from nothing. We turn to him out of our wonder at the beauty and formal complexity of Nature.
6. Visionary response: the brain can directly contact "the light," a form of pure awareness that feels joyful and blessed. This contact can be bewildering, because it has no roots in the material world.
It comes as a vision, and the G.o.d that matches it is exalted-he delivers healing and miracles. We need such a G.o.d to explain why magic can exist side by side with ordinary mundane reality.
7. Sacred response: the brain was born from a single fertilized cell that had no brain functions in it, only a speck of life.
Even though a hundred billion neurons developed from that speck, it remains intact in all its innocence and simplicity. The brain senses this as its source and origin. To match it, there is a G.o.d of pure being, one who doesn"t think but just is. We need him because without a source, our existence has no foundation at all.
These seven responses, all very real and useful to us in our long journey as a species, form the unshakable basis of religion. If you compare any two minds-Moses or Buddha, Jesus or Freud, Saint Francis or Chairman Mao-each projects a different view of reality with a matching G.o.d. No one can shoehorn G.o.d into a single box. We must have a range of vision as vast as human experience itself. Atheists need their G.o.d, who is absent and nonexistent, while at the other extreme mystics need their G.o.d, one of pure love and light. Only the brain can deliver this vast range of deities.
You might immediately object that the human mind creates these versions of G.o.d, not just the brain. I absolutely agree-in the long run the mind is much more primary than the brain in creating all perception. But for now the brain is our only concrete way of entering the mind. In cartoons a lightbulb shows up over somebody"s head when he has a bright idea; this isn"t so in real life. The mind without the brain is as invisible and unprovable as G.o.d.
Also, you might argue that just because G.o.d is seen in a certain way by us, that doesn"t mean he is that way. I don"t believe this is black or white. G.o.d"s reality doesn"t stand apart from our perceptions but is woven into them. A mother can see her newborn child as wonderful and worthy, and through her perception that baby grows up to become a wonderful, worthy person. This is one of the mysteries of love. A subtle give-and-take is going on at the deepest level between parent and child. In the same way G.o.d seems to grow directly out of our deepest inner values. There is a similar give-and-take below the level of mere belief. Peel away all the layers of an onion, and at the center you will find emptiness; peel away all the layers of a human being, and at the center you will find the seed of G.o.d.
I believe that G.o.d has to be known by looking in the mirror.
If you see yourself in fear, barely holding on with survival at stake, yours is a G.o.d of fight or flight.
If you see yourself as capable of power and accomplishment, yours is a G.o.d of the reactive response.
If you see yourself as centered and calm, yours is a G.o.d of the restful awareness response.
If you see yourself as growing and evolving, yours is a G.o.d of the intuitive response.
If you see yourself as someone who makes personal dreams come true, yours is a G.o.d of the creative response.
If you see yourself as capable of working miracles, yours is a G.o.d of the visionary response.
If you see yourself as one with G.o.d, yours is a G.o.d of the sacred response.
Although everyone"s brain can create countless thoughts-just to take a number, at ten thoughts a minute, a single brain would conjure up more than 14,000 thoughts a day, 5 million a year, and 350 million in a lifetime. To preserve our sanity, the gross majority of these thoughts are repet.i.tions of past thoughts, mere echoes. The brain is economical in how it produces a thought. Instead of having millions of ways, it has only a limited number. Physicists like to say that the universe is really just "quantum soup" bombarding our senses with billions of bits of data every minute. This swirling chaos must also be organized into a manageable number. So the brain, with its seven basic responses, provides more than sanity and meaning: it provides a whole world. Presiding over this self-created world is a G.o.d who embraces everything, but who also must fit into the brain"s way of working.
In one way or another, when a person says the word G.o.d, he is pointing to a specific response from this list: Any G.o.d who protects us like a father or mother stems from fight or flight.
Any G.o.d who makes laws and rules over society stems from the reactive response.
Any G.o.d who brings inner peace stems from the restful awareness response.
Any G.o.d who encourages human beings to reach their full potential stems from the intuitive response.
Any G.o.d who inspires us to explore and discover stems from the creative response.
Any G.o.d who makes miracles stems from the visionary response.
Any G.o.d who brings us back into unity with him stems from the sacred response.
As far as I know, the brain cannot register a deity outside the seven responses. Why not? Because G.o.d is woven into reality, and the brain knows reality in these limited ways. It may sound as though we"re reducing the Almighty Father, the Primeval G.o.ddess, and the Mystery of Mysteries to a firestorm of electrical activity in the cerebral cortex-but we aren"t doing that. We are trying to find the basic facts that will make G.o.d possible, real, and useful.
Many people will be sympathetic to this because they long for a G.o.d who fits into their lives. No one can make G.o.d enter the everyday world, however. The real question is whether he might be here already and going unnoticed. I keep coming back to the transition zone in our "reality sandwich." Unless you are willing to take your vision there, the presence of G.o.d is too ghostly to be relied upon. Is the brain prepared for such a journey? Absolutely.
A friend of mine once knew John Lennon very well and continued over the years to grieve his pa.s.sing. She is a gifted singer, and one night recently she had a dream in which he came to her and showed her an image from the past when they were together. Waking up, she decided to write a new, very intimate song based on her dream, yet in the cold light of day she began to have doubts. I came to London for a visit, and she told me about her indecision.
"After all, it"s only a dream, isn"t it?" she said. "Maybe I"m foolish to make too much of it."
At that moment her three-year-old ran into the room and plopped himself onto a chair in the corner. He happened to land on the remote control for the television, which came on suddenly. On the screen, amazingly, we saw a nostalgia program showing John Lennon and my friend smiling at the camera, caught in the exact moment she had witnessed in her dream. She burst into tears and got her answer: She would write the song for him.
I believe that this interaction took place in the transition zone. A message arrived from a deeper place than we usually go. To say that it came from spirit or G.o.d is totally justified, but the brain also played its part, for this incident began with everyday brain processes-thoughts, emotions, dreams, doubts-that finally crystallized into inspiration. We see a perfect example here of our fifth response, the creative response.
Can we truly satisfy the demands of objectivity when it comes to G.o.d? A physicist would recognize our reality sandwich with no difficulty. The material world has long since dissolved for the great quantum thinkers.
(2) After Einstein made time and s.p.a.ce into fluid things that merge into each other, the traditional universe couldn"t hold up. In the reality sandwich of physics there are also three levels: Material reality, the world of objects and events Quantum reality, a transition zone where energy turns into matter Virtual reality, the place beyond time and s.p.a.ce, the origin of the universe Here we run into a semantic problem, because the phrase virtual reality is no longer used the way a physicist would understand it. These words now commonly mean computer-simulated reality or even, very loosely, any video game. So I will modify virtual reality and call it the virtual domain, and to follow suit, quantum reality will have to become the quantum domain.
It isn"t just coincidence that these three layers parallel the religious worldview. The two models have to parallel each other, because they are both delineated by the brain. Science and religion are not really opposites but just very different ways of trying to decode the universe.
Both visions contain the material world, which is a given. There has to be an unseen source of creation, because the cosmos can be traced back only so far before time and s.p.a.ce dissolve. And there has to be a place where these two opposites meet.
I said before that I don"t think mystics are set apart from ordinary people. They are just better quantum navigators. They journey into the transition zone closer to G.o.d, and while we might visit there for a few moments of joy, at most a few days, saints and mystics have found the secret of remaining there far longer. Instead of wondering about the mystery of life, a saint lives it. Yet even without adequate words to convey that experience, we find certain similarities from culture to culture: The body"s heaviness becomes as if weightless.
A sense of floating or looking down from above is felt.
Breathing becomes lighter, rarefied, more even.
Physical pain or discomfort are much lessened.
A sense of energy streams through the body.
Color and sound are heightened; increased sensitivity to all senses.
A common phrase for this sensation, which one hears over and over, is "going into the light." It"s a phenomenon not limited to saints. Some or all of these bodily changes occur to common people. Existence breaks through its drab routine with a surge of bliss and purity. Some mystics describe these moments as timeless. Afterward a psychological afterglow often persists, a peaceful certainty that one has "come home." In this transition zone that almost reaches G.o.d"s domain, experience is both inner and outer.
But what if we could steady our flash of ecstasy and learn to explore this strange new territory? Then we would discover the same thing revealed to Dame Julian six hundred years ago: "He is our clothing that wraps us and winds us about, embraces us and all-encloses us, for love.... Remain in this, and you shall know more of the same... without end." In other words, the sacred isn"t a feeling, it is a place. The problem is that when you try to journey there, material reality keeps pulling you back again. The wondrous moment pa.s.ses. To remain in the transition zone is extremely difficult.
Let me bring these abstract terms down to earth. Some of the following experiences have occurred to all of us: In the midst of danger, you feel suddenly cared for and protected.
You deeply fear a crisis in your personal life, but when it comes, you experience a sudden calmness.
A stranger makes you feel a sudden rush of love.
An infant or young child looks into your eyes, and for a second you believe that an old soul is looking at you.