Meta Human: Unleashing your infinite potential ~ Deepak Chopra, M.D.

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Title: Meta Human: Unleashing your infinite potential

Author: Dr. Deepak Chopra

Genre: Non fiction, Mind and body, Spiritual life, Self-realization, Self help

Original Language: English

A New York Times bestselling author, Dr. Deepak Chopra is an accomplished writer of over 90 books in addition to being a pioneer of integrative medicine. I have read a few of his books and I am a fan. He appeared on the Ancient Aliens show some time back aired on the History channel and he bowled everyone over yet again. He shared how he’s “totally at peace” in his life on his episode of “Quoted by” with Hoda Kotb that I connected with some time back. The first book that I came across was ‘The Chopra Centre Cookbook : Nourishing Body and Soul‘. Ya, that one out of the many he wrote was my first one. I liked it thoroughly.

Dr. Chopra’s in depth understanding and insightful writing on these precariously difficult to understand concepts helped me to look at myself a little more closely. “Metahuman” is a delightful vision of the human potential and ways in which we can move beyond our limitations of the virtual mind. The way in which he roots his explanations in old as well as recent researches is very fulfilling. He is a maestro on this subject. What he is trying to do here is very courageous. Bridging the gap between the science of reality as we know it and the traditional concepts vetted in eastern philosophies is admirable. His differentiating between what we understand as reality (which in his words is an illusion) and the ultimate awareness of our being is perfectly bridged. The basis of this whole deep concept lies in the Indian tradition where pure consciousness is eternal, conscious and blissful (Sat Chit Ananda in sanskrit)

The staggering praise for METAHUMAN at the beginning of the book is quite overwhelming. I was so ready to read this reflective book. The book is lengthy and full of concepts from beyond and I have made a sincere attempt at looking them in the eye. I have tried to share my perception of these concepts as also my favorite pieces that I have quoted.

Please be warned that this is a long post as I have tried to integrate the concepts given in this book to the best of my abilities. Kindly be patient on this ride to beyond your limitations to access a field of possibilities.

“What causes real shock is that everything you perceive is adjusted. Floating molecules in the garden are adjusted into fragrances. Vibrating airwaves are adjusted into sounds you recognize and identify. There is no escaping that we live in a mind-made world. This is both the glory and peril of being human.”

Meta human as the name suggests is a book based on the concept of going beyond everyday awareness or self knowledge. Dr. Chopra believes that we live in a fantasy, an illusion that we created and can uncreate if we choose to. He quotes Planck from a 1931 interview with the Observer

“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”

He then goes ahead and quotes Werner Heisenberg, a German physicist

“What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” “The atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities and possibilities.”

Dr.Chopra believes that every second of our lives is conscious, yet our conventional wisdom takes it for granted.

“Until metareality becomes a common experience, being human has not reached its full creative capacity.”

He even quotes the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, who is an optimistic futurist in his book Homo Deus. (I am a big fan of Harari’s book Sapiens).

“on the cosmic scale of history humankind can lift its eyes up and start looking towards new horizons.”

But Chopra’s belief of consciousness belong to page 1 instead of page 409 of Harari as he writes it.

Part One of the book is about The Secrets of Meta-Reality. In this part Chopra talks about how we are entangled in an illusion. He postulates that something happened somewhere in prehistory when Homo sapiens just like that crossed over into virtual reality — which has always been a controversial concept, a little difficult to digest kind of concept. He talks about Dr. Parnia’s conclusion over the debate between Aristotle and Plato that a person is fully conscious without brain function where Aristotle was of the opinion that consciousness was a physical phenomenon while Plato found it nonphysical. He talks about how we can change our experience of what we interpret as our body. In the chapter “I” is the Creator of Illusion, he states that “I” or ‘the ego’ believes that it can manage the reality… but is that so? There are failures and retrials all the time. To let go of ego is what embracing infinity will be like. To let go of ego is what the hard part is. Is it not?

“‘I’ is a tiny thing, a single letter. But what you have built around it-what everyone has built around it-is like a coral reef made up of minuscule cells hardened over with a massive shell.”

I like how he explained the consequence of following the ego in the next lines

“Two people occupy a small dot on the map. Now expand the territory on a global scale. The human race is ravaging the planet because seven billion people, acting on the advice of “I”, prefer local experience over solving a global problem. Wars break out and populations incur death and destruction on a massive scale because the larger territory-maintaining amicable peace is sabotaged by the anger generated by every ‘I’ choosing to follow its irrational, angry, hostile agenda.”

I believe in the long run we used our minds to outwit Nature’s challenges to have finally become a consciousness-based species. As Dr. Chopra suggests, we all have a chaotic past which we build over time by making various choices regarding our likes and dislikes, our emotions, the memories that we create and hang on to. Also, the beliefs that are fed into us since we are babies, our experiences that we call life is what makes us who we are. The point is even though we have our experiences since our day one on earth, we are the ones who shape those experiences by our thoughts fed by the ego that we created. It’s our version of self.

“Our ability to edit reality is responsible for everything a human being can decide to pay attention to, and since we pay attention to billions of things, reality in its unedited state must be vastly larger.”

In the next chapter he emphasizes that the nature of human potential is infinite. The unlimited possibilities of thoughts, insights, creativity and discoveries that the humans possess makes us one of the most important consciousness-based species. In 2013 there came about a Hacking Creativity Project, the results of which were: (1) creativity is essential for solving complex problems; and (2), it is almost impossible to train people to be more creative. He states that Meta-Reality is ‘un-hackable’. Instead of training a skill in creativity we should be training a state of mind. He talks about the multiple dimensions of awareness and how our ancestors may have the potential to be fully aware, the clue to which may be embedded in the evolution of our species.

“Our nearest relations among living species are the chimpanzee and the gorilla, but we did not descend from them or any other ape, contrary to popular opinion. The last common ancestor between humans and chimpanzees lived around thirteen million years ago, according to the best current estimate, leading to a genetic split. One branch of the split evolved into chimps, gorillas, orangutans, and their relations, while the other branch led to our hominid ancestors.”

“Mind is the activity of thought. Consciousness is the field of pure awareness.” “Consciousness is the ocean, mind is the waves that play across the ocean’s surface.”

Meta-Reality offers absolute freedom. This is the title of chapter 4 in which Dr. Chopra asserts that we live in this virtual reality which is a setup, a trap. He holds the view that even though science is a liberating force, it has somehow blocked the vision of absolute freedom. He has quoted Pinker, a renowned psychologist from Harvard and Russian-American physicist Linde on several occasions. In the following lines he quotes Albert Einstein:

“A human being experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison…”

The analogy of the painted lady butterfly who can do a whole bunch of things conspicuous to us understanding humans is something we can barely comprehend. Maybe the evolution has already created a reality for this beautiful creature. In Dr. Chopra’s view, the ‘mind, body, brain and universe are modified consciousness’ (as is the heading of his next chapter).

“”Everything, always, and everywhere” is the real story of creation. It alone tells us who we are and why we are here.”

In explaining how the collective consciousness created a sense of space, time, matter, energy and so forth; Dr. Chopra has given various examples of instincts in creatures around the world like the circadian biorhythm with which we wake and sleep are maybe imprinted in our genes. In one particular example, he talks about the red knot (a small sandpiper bird that migrates a long distance), timing its travel in accordance with a primordial event of horseshoe crabs spawning and how these little birds and the flora around them bring changes in themselves before the main event is purely on instinct. Or, could it be that the red knot’s DNA is hardwired to know every detail of the future?

We might speculate that animals live in the present moment, reacting to the instincts that tell them that now is the time to eat or sleep or hunt. But “present moment” doesn’t exist for a creature that has no concept of time.”

He finds solid physicality an illusion, but finds a more pressing issue to be whether human’s sense of consciousness is the creative force behind what he calls “something from nothing”.

“To evolve to metahuman, however, we need to stop thinking of creation in fixed terms. Reality must be rebuilt to account for the role consciousness plays. There are only two levels of reality. One level is unbounded pure consciousness, which is a field of potential. The other level is consciousness in its excited state (to borrow a phrase from particle physics), which we call the universe.”

By the time we reach chapter 6, Dr. Chopra is already on to the concept that existence and consciousness are the same. He believes that consciousness expands endlessly and that the clue is self-creation. That the simplest formulation of truth is the awareness and existence simply are, as in they are uncreated.

In time, Homo Sapiens rushed through another door, the one that opened to self-awareness. We can do anything with our potential that we want to, but no matter how civilization changes, it is impossible to be human without being aware.”

He rests part one by quoting Aldous Huxley, a British writer in the following lines —

“Each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is the measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet.”

In Part Two of the book Dr. Chopra teaches us “waking up”. Part one was all about the knowledge, while part two is about the experience.

Being stuck in virtual realty is like being under a hypnotic spell, and we can’t break the spell as long as it has us in its grip-there is no hypnotist standing by who can snap his fingers and break the spell for us.”

Dr. Chopra believes that we constructed and humanized our version of reality based on our experiences and we could break those shackles if we chose to.

He talks about the concept of reification – giving immaterial experiences “thingness” in that we can feel certain things in their quantum state but we create an awareness about those features in our mental state. Basically it means to be more aware of what we are experiencing through our senses.

“As ‘thingness’ stops being so stubborn, experience is transformed into something fluid, flexible and malleable. The reality of the ‘true self’ is critical, because, as things stand, everyone has a self filled with contradictions. The self you have been identifying with keeps you in the spell/dream/illusion. The true self takes you from illusion to reality.”

He tells us about the three versions of the self:

1. The ego: personality “I”
2. The unconscious self: where you perceive the surroundings even before being aware
3. The true self: where the ‘I am’ brings total fulfillment

Dr. Chopra then comes to the next chapter The Direct Path where he quotes the Vedas

The ancient Vedas declare that everyone is defined by their deepest desires. Desire leads to thoughts, thoughts to words and actions, actions to the fulfillment of desire. So in a very basic way, desire is all you need. If your deepest desire is to wake up, to escape the illusion, to unveil reality, and in the end to know who you really are, the message gets through. Your deepest desire activates a level of awareness that will get you to the goal.”

He says that there is a big gap between where we stand and the reality that exist. Its the pitfalls, he says that are painful, not waking up and that these pitfalls are created by the ‘I’.

Next he talks about Self-Regulation: The glue of existence and the sense of Self.

“Everything that exists ‘out there’ or “in here” is glued together by your sense of self, because it is the common denominator in every experience. Once you see this, you can identify with your sense of self, and then the direct path has reached its goal.

He says that awareness is present both inside and outside and that it does not depend on space. He summarizes part two of the book in the following lines

“The leap from human to meta human, the shift from virtual reality to the “real” reality, is all contained in the simple act of noticing the self. Not the ego, which wants to hog the limelight and claim that it and it alone is the self.”

Part Three is all about Being Metahuman. Here, concepts of freeing the body and recovering the whole mind are dealt with. Dr. Chopra provides an exercise in which he deals with the body in awareness, in continuation he teaches how to be timeless.

“Once you realize that you are whole, the transformation from human to meta human has occurred.”

In the next chapter, Dr. Chopra focuses on Recovering the Whole Mind.

“Whole mind contains the infinite potential that is unique to Homo Sapiens.”

He asks to do a daily exercise of eyes open, no thoughts to learn to live in wholeness naturally.

In Clearing the Way for the Self, he gives an example

“In one tale, a fish is frantic with thirst, rushing around to find a drink of water. Even at four years old a child laughs at the silly fish who doesn’t know it is surrounded by water. Only when you grow up does the seriousness of the paradox set in.”

He maintains that even though he says metareality is “always, everything and everywhere”, it is still a paradoxical situation. We have certain mistaken beliefs which we need to acknowledge and get over.

“When people speak of “aha” moments, insight and intuition have cut through a tangled problem and gone directly to the truth.” “The beauty of an insight is that it is self-justifying. You just know.”

The penultimate chapter is Choiceless Awareness where Dr. Chopra claims that ours is the only species that must try to be happy, but is it that easy I wonder? After giving a brief on Sigmund Freud’s years as a refugee and the trouble with which he had to flee his country, Dr. Chopra wrote the following lines which made me think how exactly humans can remain happy

“After paying an extortionate “flight” tax by which the Nazis ruthlessly stripped Jews of their money and property, the founder of psychoanalysis left for England in a state of pessimistic gloom, wondering as fear and terror blossomed like a poisonous flower if it was asking too much simply to prevent humans from committing murder.”

After reading this part, I have suddenly got a little curious about Sigmund Freud and how he had to flee. You know the perils of humanity. I would like to read something on these lines some time.

While talking about Practical immortality, Dr. Chopra implies that by using our imagination we fill in the blanks of our understanding and that it is a constant practice.

“Using our imagination is one way you and I and everyone else are living the mystery. No one created imagination, just as no one created creativity. No one created evolution, either. When you get closer to the source, where consciousness in all its diversity begins to narrow down to one thing, it is evident that being human depends on contacting the immortal domain constantly, not just every day but every second.”

“For our entire lives, all of us have been taught how to live in the state of practical immortality. Everything is gauged according to how it fits in between birth and death.”

The final chapter One Life as the name suggests points towards being whole, the collective consciousness which is governed by one consciousness.

This book has proposed that creation unfolds from pure consciousness. There is no divine artist with a picture in mind. There is just creation evolving without end.” “The evolution of consciousness is the only explanation for creation that holds everything together.”

Dr. Deepak Chopra ends this part of the book as follows after which he gives a 31-day guide to becoming METAHUMAN.

The average person isn’t prepared to accept responsibility for the spell/ dream/illusion we are entangled in. The accumulation of greenhouse gases can be explained as divine retribution, or as the outcome of a series of very unfortunate events, or as human imperfection screwing up one more thing. Self-destruction is part of our nature, but self-creation is infinitely more powerful. By waking up, metahumans can make right what humans have done wrong. Waking up happens only one person at a time. Reality isn’t a numbers game. Its a one-player universe, and you and I are enough to move creation itself.”

The final word here is the simple understanding of the concept that it is impossible to codify the invisible that makes us human. What does make us human? To be human, we need to learn to pay attention.We need to understand and remember what it means all the while keeping it in the mind and be able to go back to it when we want to. We have to aim at the three experiences: to see reality more clearly, feel less entangled in habit, memory and the like, and stop drooling over external rewards and expectations. Dr.Chopra in this book argues that if we go beyond the physical world, we would wake up to consciousness- experiences that will blow open our minds, bodies and souls.

Sum up Quotes:

“anything you can count, measure, calculate and reduce to data is part of an all encompassing illusion.” “Whatever you perceive, imagine or think about in words inhabits the same illusion.” “It is the state of separation we keep reinforcing, generation after generation.” to be experienced directly.” “But only waking up allows for the unity of one life.”

“If we can create a world of glorious highs without being fully awake, imagine what we could do with our eyes wide open.”

There is so much to absorb from this book. I recommend to go slow, let each word, each sentence, each concept sink in bite by bite. The understanding of this book lies in an open mind. So while you are at it reading this wonderful take on life, keep your inner eyes open.