Deepak Chopra on the Two Most Important Open Questions in Science
What is the fundamental activity in the universe? Medicine has made enormous progress in looking at how the brain correlates subjective and objective experience, yet there is still no concrete answer on how we experience mental or perceptual reality. Understanding consciousness is one of the greatest cosmic riddles. Deepak Chopra – one of most brilliant minds dedicated to unravelling this great mystery- reveals his latest theory in this interview. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
You've got to understand what you're experiencing right now is a virtual reality.
Imagine a beautiful sunset on the ocean.
You see a picture.
Or listen to your favorite song.
You hear, I hear John Lennon singing, Imagine.
But there's no song in my head.
There are no pictures in my head.
All there is, is neurochemistry.
But where is the actual experience happening?
That's called the hard problem of consciousness. - Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Oz, and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
What is the fundamental activity in the universe?
Well, medicine has made enormous progress on looking at how the brain correlates subjective and objective experiences, yet there is no single easy, concrete answer on how we experience reality, mental, perceptual, any reality.
It's one of the greatest cosmic riddles, understanding consciousness.
So to understand consciousness, I thought I'd sit down with a guy that I trust on this stuff a lot, Deepak Chopra, one of the most brilliant minds dedicated to unraveling the great mystery of consciousness to help us gain a better understanding.
So the thing about this discussion, series of discussions I was having with Deepak, Lisa, is that he...
It takes it to a whole different level.
It doesn't get bogged down in the usual dogma, the vocabulary that holds us back.
He asks the much bigger question of how do we perceive and process anything?
It actually gives us a pretty good clue into the source of a lot of the oral traditions, even the religions that today so many of the humans that populate this globe believe in.
One of the things I love about Deepak is that he is comfortable embracing the mystery.
So many people feel like they need certainty, and Deepak is cool with just saying, this is the deep mystery.
And it's a little scary when you think about the reality that the simplest, seeming easiest process, understanding how we have consciousness, is completely unexamined.
Medicine can't get headway.
The most complicated, challenging element, in fact, the most complicated issue within the Bible, if you're a Christian, or the Torah, if you're Jewish, or the Quran, or frankly, any religious process, is consciousness.
It's never really defined.
It's there.
We talk about it in many ways.
We talk about it as a soul.
There's different language tags you try to put on it.
But we don't really understand what consciousness is.
No, and that is maybe our life's goal, right?
To finally come to terms with what makes us uniquely human and connects us to everything else.
That is the underlying universal.
Well, since you speak of underlying universal elements, that is the other big question, right?
What is the basic element of existence?
What is the building block of the universe?
So Deepak is going to give us a twofer.
And we had the interview in the most appropriate of settings.
Within the walls of the Vatican.
That's right.
We sat there at this unique location talking about the two biggest unaddressed questions.
And this is what Deepak had to say.
I found it profoundly enlightening.
Deepak, there are over a hundred essential questions that I'm told we should know the answer to if we could.
But there are two that are greater than all the rest.
Have to do with the nature of the universe and the essence of consciousness.
These are perhaps the biggest topics that we have to wrap our brains around, so I turn to you for guidance on how you think about these challenges.
You're correct, Mehmet.
Those are the two most important open questions in science.
Number one, what is the universe made of?
Number two, what's the biological basis of consciousness?
Because first, there is a universe, but second, you experience it.
Every time you look at the sky, you're looking at the Milky Way galaxy.
So the two are connected.
Why are they open questions?
Why don't we know the answers?
Well, according to current science, 70% of the universe is a force called dark energy.
But don't think of this dark energy in Einstein's terms, E is equal to mc square.
It's an anti-gravity force that is expanding the space between galaxies faster than the speed of light.
So even though, according to current cosmological theories, the universe is 13.8 billion years old.
The cosmological horizon is 47 billion light years away from where we are right this moment.
And galaxies are tumbling into the unknowable across that horizon.
Why do I say unknowable?
Because by the time light gets...
From there to where we are, our solar system will have exhausted its thermonuclear energy and burnt itself up into the heat death of absolute zero.
So 70% is this...
But we don't know what it is.
Einstein called it the cosmological constant, but then he said it was a blunder.
As it turns out, he was right.
It was a mathematical constant.
That leaves 30% of the universe remaining.
Of that, 26% is another entity that cosmologists describe.
They call it dark matter.
Why do they call it dark matter?
Because it's invisible.
You can't see it.
And why can't you see it?
Because it's not made of atoms.
Now, there are candidates for this mysterious dark matter.
The most popular one right now is called WIMP, W-I-M-P, Weakly Interacting Massive Particle.
What it is, nobody knows.
So again, it's a construct, mathematical, so that we can accommodate what is called the standard equation in physics.
So now we're left with 4% of the universe, because 26% is dark matter.
Of that 4%, 99.99% or more is invisible interstellar dust.
People think it's hydrogen or helium, but you can't see it anyway.
So what's left is 0.01% of the universe, which is the visible atomic universe.
According to current scientific models, that's Two trillion galaxies.
That's 706 trillion stars.
Unless you're a mathematician, you don't know how to even write that.
And that's uncountable trillions of planets.
According to, again, the current astrobiologists, and there's a field, believe it or not, in Columbia, Harvard, MIT, called astrobiology.
These are people who are I'm guessing where other life forms might be, even life like us, based on the statistical probabilities of what they call a biosphere.
According to current cosmology there might be 60 billion habitable planets In the Milky Way galaxy.
But the Milky Way galaxy is where we reside.
That's 100 billion stars.
Right next door is Andromeda.
Then there's Virgo.
Keep going until you get to 2 trillion.
That is 0.01%.
The rest is unknown or possibly unknowable.
Because how do you interact with a matter that's not atomic?
Your body is made of atoms, right?
So if this is non-atomic, it may be unknowable.
Well, the problem doesn't end here.
The atomic universe is made of atoms, and if you ask particle physicists, you know, what are atoms made of?
They'll say particles, subatomic particles.
And you keep going down till you end up with quarks and what are called leptons.
And what are they made of?
Well...
It seems they have a dual nature.
They're schizophrenic.
When you're looking at them, they look like particles which have mass and energy.
But left alone, they evolve into waves.
That's well-known, the wave-particle duality.
But if you ask mathematicians or physicists, what are these waves made of?
Because everything is made of something.
The ocean waves are made of water.
The sound waves are made of air.
What are the waves that create the universe made of?
They'll say they're made of possibilities.
So you say, where do these possibilities exist?
And they'll say they exist in Hilbert space.
Now it turns out that's a space described by a mathematician.
So what is Hilbert space?
Depending on who you talk to, it's multi-infinitely dimensional or it's zero-dimensional.
But so where is it?
And the standard answer is shut up and calculate if you want your job, because it's a mathematical idea.
Bottom line, what's the universe made of?
You put it all together, nothing.
Even the visible universe.
We have a lot more to talk about, but first, let's take a quick break.
So now how does that relate to our second question, which is what's the nature of consciousness?
Because every neuroscientist will tell you, and you're a surgeon, and everyday people are put under anesthesia, they lose consciousness, so it's probably here.
Or if you hit somebody on the head, they lose consciousness, so it's here.
Well, if it is, how do you explain experience?
By looking at the brain.
Right now, people are watching us on the internet.
You're talking to me.
All that's happening is photons are coming from my body.
They're bouncing off my body to your eyes.
Photons are invisible.
They're electromagnetic waves.
They go through your eyes.
Your eyes are nine and a half centimeters apart from each other.
They're about 2.5 centimeters by 2.5 centimeters.
Your retina is curved.
By the time those photons get into your retina, if there was an image in the retina, which there isn't, but let's say there was an image in the retina, you'd see two of me upside down and curved and nine centimeters apart.
Well, it's not happening.
The eyes send, the retina sends an electrical signal, we call it an action potential, to the brain.
What happens in the brain is neurotransmitters are released and suddenly you experience this.
You see color, you hear sounds, you taste, you smell, you feel sensations, you can go out and see the Milky Way.
How does that happen?
That's called the hard problem of consciousness.
So actually, we cannot explain any experience, not a perceptual experience.
We can't explain an image.
If I ask you right now, imagine a beautiful sunset on the ocean.
You see a picture or listen to your favorite song.
You hear, I hear John Lennon singing, Imagine.
But there's no song in my head.
There's only electrochemicals.
There are no pictures in my head.
There's nothing that we call mental experience in my head.
All there is is neurochemistry.
And these events in the brain that occur with perceptual or mental experience, they're called the neural correlates of consciousness or the neural correlates of experience, mental and perceptual.
But where is the actual experience happening?
How does the Milky Way galaxy fit inside this head or this room or this body?
The hard problem of consciousness.
So people are struggling with this.
And, you know, I go to consciousness conferences, science conferences all the time.
You have a bunch of neuroscientists talking about downloading consciousness.
It's nonsense because you can't find consciousness in the brain.
What you can find is Is the neural correlates.
So what about the fact that anesthesia, you know, you put somebody anesthesia, maybe you knock out their, for a moment, their microtubules or whatever.
That just blocks the neural correlates and blocks the perceptual experience.
But where is the experience happening?
It's not only experience, but everything that we call conscious intent.
I raise my hand up, right?
I start with an intention, which is immaterial.
But it ends up with electrochemistry and this going up.
If mind and matter were two separate things, then that shouldn't happen.
This violates the laws of thermodynamics.
Just doing this, or my speaking, violates every law if you believe in mind and matter as two separate entities.
Okay, so now we're stuck.
We don't know what the universe is made of and we don't know how we experience it and how we think about it.
What is the source of intention, insight, imagination, creativity, introspection and curiosity?
The brain can't explain it.
It can only show the correlates.
There is a solution to this, though.
But before you get to the solution, just so I'm clear, are you of the belief that our physical brain is more like an antenna?
It's sort of able to perhaps translate what consciousness is to our physical body, but it can be independent of consciousness?
That's a good metaphor, that it's an antenna.
It's a good metaphor, but it's closer to the truth would be.
It's a modified form of consciousness.
So the brain is what the mind looks like to an outside observer.
So you can't see my mind, okay?
But if you look at a PET scan or a CAT scan, what you can see is the material correlate of My mind.
When I talk about consciousness, I'm not talking about mind.
See, the mind is a conditioned form of consciousness.
So how is it conditioned?
By history, by culture, by religion, by economics.
We all have different minds, innumerable minds.
Okay, because they're conditioned.
When a child is born...
So let me ask, just to clarify this, and make it very simple for you.
What is this?
It's a tracking device for steps.
Okay.
What is this?
Short.
What is this?
Jack, very nice by the way.
Okay, what is this?
Your hand.
Okay, these are human constructs for modes of knowing and experience in human consciousness.
If you were a baby, no language.
What you would experience without words would be a shape, a color, a smell.
If I gave this to you, a baby, no idea about a tracking device or a watch, it would try to eat it up, it would smell it, it would taste it, it would decide whether it likes it or not, throw it away, try to swallow it till the mummy says, don't do that, that's a watch.
Now, suddenly, a watch construct.
What the baby was experiencing was consciousness modifying itself as shapes, colors, smells, textures, etc., likes, dislikes, but the rest is a story.
Once you get this, this is a human story, then what we live in is a human universe.
Gluons, force fields, particles, leptons, quarks, gravity are names humans have given to modes of knowing and experience in consciousness.
But that creates the human mind, which creates the human civilization.
You know, once we develop language, For raw experience, which is nothing other than perception, that's it.
Raw experience is perception.
Perception is a modification of consciousness.
But once we develop language to describe this, then we created what we call the human experience.
Money is a concept.
Right?
Latitude and longitude are concepts.
I'll meet you at the corner of Broadway and 56 and we'll go to Serafina and have Caesar salad.
All those are concepts.
Very useful.
But with this ability to, I say, reify experience.
Experience is nothing other than sensations, images, feelings, thoughts, which are modifications of consciousness.
But the human ability to give it A concept or a construct, reified, creates the notion of objects.
So before you can call this a watch, you have to experience it in your consciousness as a shape, as a color, as a form.
The rest is a story.
We've got a whole lot more to discuss after the break.
So let me extrapolate to the big question, because we're at a conference in the Vatican talking about faith and science.
And perhaps no more is it more evident than this issue of consciousness and how it correlates to faiths.
So, in the beginning there was the word.
Very beautifully said.
What is the importance of that line that you're putting a word, a construct, if I interpret you correctly, on this And how do you reconcile religions that have very different translations, interpretations of consciousness, when it might be much bigger than we can comprehend?
That's a beautiful statement.
First, there was the Word.
The Word was with God.
The Word became the flesh.
It's from John, but it's everywhere in every religion, that the human ability to create concepts out of raw experience, which is consciousness, modifying itself as experience, that gave us the ability to get knowledge, the knowledge of good and evil, which means evolution and entropy, in my words, but doesn't matter.
And that created our ability to create science, technology, etc.
Now artificial intelligence, augmented reality, virtual reality.
But first you've got to understand that what you're experiencing right now is a virtual reality.
The raw experience is just colors, shapes, smells, textures, modified forms of consciousness.
Now, when you look at the religious experience, it doesn't matter where the experience came from.
If you sift it out, if you sift out all the, you know, there's a lot of mythology and religion.
I think of religion as organized mythology from the Bronze Age, actually, organized religion.
But nevertheless, when you look at the religious experience, you find three things.
First is transcendence.
And transcendence means you go beyond all concepts.
You transcend thought.
You transcend the subject-object split.
So from a personal point of view, there's me, there's Mehmet, there's all these people, and there's the universe.
That's my personal privileged perspective.
But from the universal point of view, you and I and everything is all happening at the same time.
And it's not just a thing.
It's not a noun.
It's a verb.
It's constantly evolving, you know.
So the first experience, religious experience, is transcendence.
In the words of, since we are at the Vatican, in the words of Jesus, I and the Father are one.
I am in you, you are in me.
That's transcendence.
Inseparability of existence.
Now, science is slowly getting there when it talks about entanglement.
But, you know, you have to be careful which scientists you talk to, because they'll hate it when they think they've been hijacked by spirituality or religion.
But it could be the other way around.
So what is entanglement is that at the fundamental level of creation, space-time, energy, matter, Information all exist as possibilities.
We're getting back to possibilities.
Transcendence.
There's no subject-object split.
There's no difference between me and you.
And experientially, that leads to what we call platonic values.
Love.
Compassion, joy, equanimity, peace of mind, empathy, things that are part of all religion, right?
Those are platonic values after Plato.
Also the desire for knowing truth, goodness, beauty, harmony, understanding, evolution.
Not necessarily in biological terms, but the evolution of consciousness as it expands from me to we to us to oneness.
Schrodinger, who was one of the pioneers, he said, consciousness is a singular that has no plural.
So there you are.
So the first is transcendence.
The second is the emergence of moral, ethical codes of conduct, not as imposed morality, but a natural consequence of the experience of transcendence.
And the third is the loss of the fear of death.
This is common to every religious experience.
You can go anywhere in the world, whether it's Christianity or Sufi Islam or Hindus or Buddhists, Nirvana, whatever.
There's no fear of death because that which is transcendent is not in time.
Time begins with subject-object separation.
So as soon as I'm a subject and the rest is an object, there's a relationship between subject and I start to measure out experience, I create the experience of time.
Whereas at the fundamental reality, there's no space, there's no time, there's no information, there's no energy, there's the...
Emergence of all there is.
So religious experience is common everywhere.
The rest is dogma, it's ideology.
Let me finish with a comment I heard from a very wise attendee at this conference.
I asked him about consciousness and religion, and he said, all the religions are pointing to the moon.
But you have to actually go look at the moon.
That's beautifully said.
Beautifully said.
What religions call our soul is a little drop in the ocean of consciousness.
As Rumi said, you're not just a drop in the ocean, you're also the ocean in the drop.
So the divine exists in you as consciousness.
Wonderful said.
Thank you.
Philosopher doctor.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Namaste.
Namaste.
It's the part of the body that we don't focus on enough in medicine, I think, anyway.
Our soul.
It's our connector.
It's our compass.
It can be both young and old.
It can be mortal, immortal.
But it's also a way we define our intentions.
And Deepak went on to say in an article that he posted a few weeks back that the soul as a human concept is what it is.
It's just a tag for experiencing the transcendent.
The transcendent is something that we're just so uncomfortable with because we can't touch it.
But no tag is as valuable as experiencing the transcendent itself, which is actually the goal of waking up.
You talk about that, Lisa, a lot.
Whenever I get into a funk, I try to elevate it.
Tell you to experience the transcendent?
Well, just to recognize that some things have to be experiential.
You can't read about some things.
You have to actually do them.
That's what the journey of the mystic is, right?
It's that experience, and it's not something you can articulate, really.
It's beyond words.
Well, the interesting thing for me is Deepak wrote this article that I just touched on, and this is the first paragraph.
Depending on which polls you consult, more than half of Americans and up to 67%, two-thirds, believe that a person's soul goes to heaven or hell after death.
That's remarkable.
Right?
It's especially strong considering that more and more Americans no longer identify with a fixed religion.
They say, you know, I'm not religious, I'm just spiritual.
That's become a very common sentiment.
A lot of you listening probably may feel that yourselves.
Yet the idea of a soul continues to hold its place.
I might say it actually seems to outstrip God as a matter of belief.
And when I read through this article, and again, it's It's a profoundly deep concept.
It took me to a place that I didn't think I'd end up, because belief in the soul, Deepak argues, is a very hopeful state, but it turns out to be a two-edged sword.
Hope is cherished, right, because it opens up possibilities, but at the same time, it blocks the way of going forward, because you get stuck in your faith.
It's like getting stuck in anything else.
It becomes very static, and the spiritual journey that needs to occur ends up Really needing to eliminate illusions, because once every illusion is gone, what remains has to be real.
And in reality, consciousness is the source of everything in existence, unfolding all the things that we think we know.
And once all that's gone, then we're freed to really see what existence is about.
I think this is true of almost all transcendent religions.
The mystic religions...
Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, all these religions have it, when you get past the dogma that's offered, which has its own value, by the way, and Richard Rohr, who we both talk about a lot, makes the argument that the first half of life needs to be about understanding the rules Of engagement with, I guess, consciousness or what true reality is.
You've got to know what the moral compass is and codes and how do you teach your kids what to do?
I mean, it's hard to do that by yourself without some kind of a rule book.
But it's not about the rules.
The second half of life is transcending those rules, getting past them, and truly experiencing what that process is.
It's like, you might like basketball or football or baseball, so whatever rules you need to know, you need to know to play the game.
But the actual game isn't the rules.
It's the experience of being on the field and being with each other and interacting.
That's the real game.
And that actually is much more similar across those three sports I listed and every other sport you can come up with.
Then the actual rules that, you know, they have three strikes, you have 60 minutes, there's a tip-off or a kick-off.
Anyway, back to the issue, the more important issue of the game of life.
The second half isn't about the rules.
It's about that transcendent experience.
Which you have to sort of do yourself.
It's like sleep.
You got to do it on your own.
You might sleep next to somebody, but you're not doing it with them.
It's true.
So, with all that said, you've got a lot more insights with Deepak that I continue to want to harvest on this program, and I will.
Just a wonderful sage individual.
So, take a little time, whether it's through meditation, just silence by yourself, some mindfulness.
Take some time to try to figure out how you need to transcend all the stuff that's going on around you.
