Deepak Chopra on How to Reach God.1

According to the cover blurb on the book "How to Know God" (2000), Deepak Chopra has written some 26 books and is one of the most popular writers and "gurus" on spirituality. So last night I read the concluding chapter of his book by way of comparison with the approach adopted by Krishnamurti, who advocates going it alone as against following the teachings of any so-called gurus. The chapter is entitled "Contacting God".

Chopra starts with a quotation, "Ask and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock and it will be opened to you" Matt. 7: 7. He is aware that our feeling that we are in touch with God in a mystic trance may well be the effect of a lesion or epileptic seizure in the right temporal lobe of a so-called "saint" but he speculates that the convinced atheist may also be shutting himself from messages from God every day.

Chopra thinks that God may contact us in three ways: 1. since we are "quantum creatures", we participate in God all the time in God, who eixsts at a level of reality beyond our five senses and which forms the source of our being, at the quantum level. 2. God sends us "messages or clues" in the physical world through what he calls "the flow of reality", from outside time and space, through miracles, like those some experienced at Lourdes. According to Sri Aurobindo, who thought that all human beings are on the road to enlightenment via a process of mental evolution which starts at a level of what he calls "supra-consciousness", beginning with the higher centres of consciousness, those which helps us to intuit God's existence and gradually transforming us until the level of our cells 3. God attracts our attention through what he calls "second attention" ie. intuitions which most people ignore, through what Aurobindo calls "arrows of light" which travels only in one direction, which we receive as "impulses of inspiration" or through prophecies of the prophets, saints and such figures as Jesus who claim to "know" God directly and intimately.  But to me, Jesus is not the first to make such claim. Nor will he be the last.

Chopra thinks that while ordinary people attempt to reach God through the "conventional methods" like prayer, contemplation, faith, good works and virtue and often come up empty-handed: some prayers are answered, some not, miracles often does not happen, but such experiences are subjective and can't be shared by others. To him, God exists objectively. "To know God personally, you must penetrate a boundary that physicists call "the event horizon", on one side of which lies everything that remains within the speed of light and on the other, some messages which can have an effect in the physical quantum world but at a speed faster than the speed of light. As we approach the event boundary, as mass increases, time slows down and space becomes curved by the mass. We now know that there are black holes in the universe into which any passing stars will get sucked in and disappear. At this event horizon, strange things happen .e.g a photon travelling near a black hole will get sucked in from one point of view, that of light but from another point of view, it is frozen in time. "This borderline of uncertainty is the event horizon, the exact margin dividing reality in half between the certain and the uncertain, the known and the unknown...any place where knowledge stops there is also an event horizon. The brain can't explore beyond where photons go...A nervous system is just a machine for sensing photons. Depending on what model you have, your pattern of photons is different from that produced by other models. The mind may cross the event horizon in theory, using intellectual speculation and advanced mathematics, but this is like Alice jumping down the rabbit hole. When Kierkegaard made his famous remark that God is known only through a leap of faith, he was referring to a spiritual rabbit hole...Since the Big Bang, light has been travelling for about ten to fifteen billion years..therefore an entity farther away must remain invisible. This doesn't mean that there is no existence beyond fifteen billion years. Strangely enough, certain faraway objects appear to be emitting radiation that is older than the universe. ...If the human brain contains its own event horizon (the limit of photons to organize themselves as thought) and so does the cosmos, we must cross over to find the home of the spirit....The soul is the carrier that take us beyond; it is the essence connecting us to God."

What is a soul? Chopra quotes the Vedas which says that "the part of us that doessn't believe in death will never die." Psychologists claim that we use it to defend ourselves against the inescapable fact that one day we will die. But Chopra asks: " But what if the opposite is true? What if feeling immortal and beyond death is the most real thing about us?" He admits that "The soul is as mysterious as God and we have just as few reliable facts about it. I would offer that the first fact about the soul is that it is not really as personal as people believe. The soul does'nt feel or move; it doesn't travel with you as you go about your life, nor does it endure birth, decay and death. This is just a way of saying that the soul stands apart from ordinary experience. Since it has no shape, getting a mental picture of the soul isn't possible. Instead, the soul is really a junction point between time and the timeless. It faces in both directions. When I experience myself in the world, I am not experiencing my soul, yet it is somewhere on the perhiphery. There is no doubt that we sense its presence, howver vaguely. But it would be a mistake to think the soul and the person are the same. My grandfather was an old man  with thinning hair, prone to enthusiasm nd fierce in his love for us ...yet all his qualities and all my memories of have nothing to do with his soul. These qualities die with him; his soul did not. So the soul is like a carrier of the essence....the soul begins at the quantum level, which makes sense since the quantum level is also our doorway to God. To go through the door isn't something we choose; participation is mandatory.In India, the soul has two parts. One is called the Jiva, which corresponds to the individual soul making its long journey through many lifetiems until its reaches full realization of God. When a child is taught that being good means your soul will go to heaven, it is Jiva that we are talking about. Jiva is involved in action. It is affected by good and bad acts; it rules our conscience, and all the seeds of karma are planted inside it. The kind of person you turn out to be is rooted in Jiva and the kind of life you make for yourself will chagne jiva from day to day."

"The second half of the soul, called Atman, does not accompnay us on any journey. It is pure spirit, made of the same essence as God. Atman cannot change in any way. It never reaches God because it never left in the first place. No matter how good or bad your life, your Atman remains constant...many people wonder why the soul has to be divided this way. The answer lies at the virtual level, for we have seen that all the familiar qualities of life, such as time, space, energy, and matter, gradually fade into a shadowy existence until they disappear. But this disappearance leaves something intact--spirit itself. Jiva lives at the quantum level, Atman at the virtual. So the faintest, subtlest trace of "me" that can be detected at the quantum level is Jiva, and once it disappears, pure spirit remains--that is Atman. the distinction between them is absolutely necessary, for otherwise the path back to God would break down." Chopra summarizes the differences as follows: "You need Jiva to remember who you are personally,..Atman to remember yourself as a pure spirit. You need Jiva to have a reason to act, think, wish and dream...Atman for the peace beyond all action. You need Jiva to journey through time and space...Atman to live in the timeless. You need Jiva to preserve peronality and identity...Atman to become universal, beyond identity...Such is the paradox of the soul that it manages to accomodate itself to our world of time, thought and action while dwelling eternally in the spiritual world. The soul must be half-human, half-divine in order to give us a way to retain our identity during all the prayer, meditation, seeking and other spiritual work that is involved in finding God and yet the soul must have a divine aspect that embodies the goal of all seeking."

Chopra gives an analogy between the relationship between the Jiva and the Atman. He says that the soul gives rise to activity without being active itself in more or less the manner that certain images flicker on the TV screen giving us various images of people moving and doing certain things when in fact nobody "really" moves on the TV screen from one location on the screen to another. In the same manner, "As I travel from here to tehre, my soul doesn't move, because at the quantum level, the field just ripples and vibrates--it doesn't change location from A to B. I am born, grow old and die--these events have tremendous significance for me body and mind. Yet at the quantum level, nothing is born, grows old, and dies. There is no such thing as an old photon...If you wade out and put a cork on the water, your senses tell you that it will be carried along by the waves, but it isn't. The cork stays in place, bobbing up and down as the waves pass along. The water is also just moving up and down. It is the same water which hits the shore, not new water carried from miles away. The wave motion takes place only at the energy level, creating the íllusion that the water is getting nearing to the shore"...but the they are organized phantoms...There is intelligence behind the illusion. This presiding intelligence keeps the random flickers of the photons from being truly random; it creates forms from the formeless electrical charges....No matter what quality you look for (e.g. color/shape), it can be broken down to pulses and energy, and these pulsations have meaning only because a hidden director has created it. This is essentially the argument for the soul. It holds reality together; it is my offscreen director, my presiding intelligence. I can think, talk, work, love and dream, all because of the soul, yet the soul doesn't do any of these things. It is me.".

To me, Chopra is quite clever. He jumps on to the bandwagon of the latest findings of quantum physics about which the ordinary folks know next to nothing. But it has a suitably "scientific" air to his theory, which is just the ancient Hindu theory of the soul. He gives it a face lift, under the garb of the "quantum physics" to confuse the earnest seeker of spirituality of the "truth" of his theory, which remains little but theory and assertions. He bandies about terms in quantum physics, like "photons" ,"Big bang". "black hole", "models", "advanced mathematics", "virtual" , "event horizon", "Hesienberg's principle of uncertainty" and skilfully weaves them into his theory to give it a kind of scientific "respectability" which it would not otherwsie have. But whether what he says is persuasive is matter for individual choice. To me, it adds little to my understanding of man's relation to God. All he appears to have done is to give a new metaphor to describe the relationship between man and God but completely fails to explain how and why his theory of the soul has got any connection with the accepted quantum theory of the physicists. Just ancient Indian metaphysics of spirituality couched in pseudo-scientific terms! I regret the vagueness or even complete lack of evidence to support his theory of the so-called "qunatum soul" or "quantum God" at crucial points where explanations and evidence is required. What kind of God is he talking about? Is he a personal God? An impersonal God? What are the attributes of such a God? What is the relation between this God with the world and in particular with the world of man? If he intervenes, under what circusmstances will he do so? What does this God require of man, if he requires anything at all? Does this God have intentions? If so, what are they? In what way is God a "quantum God"? What is the evidence that he is such a God? I seem to see gaping "black holes" in all these places. But whilst one cannot agree with the logic and the grounds in purported support of his assertions, one must admit that he is an excellent writer. I understand that he has been awarded a number of awards for his public speaking skills, for his humanitarian values and his efforts at promoting peace and for his advocacy of alternative medicine.