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January/February 2007 Featured Stories
Life, Death and Other Fairy Tales

by Miriam Knight

Deepak Chopra

Deepak Chopra, author of Life After Death: The Burden of Proof, shares how pure potentiality is the wellspring of consciousness, which creates our perception of life, death and the afterlife. What is death? According to Chopra, it's how the universe recreates itself.

 

Q: Being a scientist, the synthesizer of the spiritual and scientific worlds, what makes you feel that now is the time to write a book about the afterlife?

A: Any time would have been a good time, but now is because my generation of baby boomers -- we are all on death row. And the only uncertainty is the method of execution and length of reprieve. I also lost my parents in the last five years, and I'm a physician and see dying all the time. They died with a lot of fear, anxiety and helplessness. And yet I know that death can be a creative, peaceful journey to the next state of our evolution.

 

Q: And so was this your attempt to help others who are facing these issues?

A: And to explain it as best as I could in scientific terms. The main theoretical thesis being that consciousness does not reside or totally localize in the brain or the body. Consciousness, being non-local outside of space time, cannot die. It is in the nature of consciousness to conceive, imagine, construct and become what we have called everyday reality - we're doing it right now.

We call this physical, but there's nothing physical about it. We think that objects are out there but they're in our consciousness. We think that other people are out there, but they're in our consciousness. So we're constructing and conceiving and governing and becoming all this now, and we say it's physical, but there absolutely no difference between the experience of physicality and consciousness. Without consciousness, it's ambiguous energy. Biology is a byproduct of our consciousness.

 

Q: You mention a surprising study from the University of Virginia.

A: Yes, there were studies on 2,500 children who have memories of other lifetimes. Some of them have scars from injuries in other lifetimes - which are just like stigmata - a deep impression in consciousness that translates into a deep impression in biology.

 

Q: What happens to us in the afterlife?

A: First we return to our ground state, which is the state of pure potentiality, and that is not a location, it is a potential. It is where every thought comes from right now and where every thought goes. It's where memories are now, at this moment, before we actualize them in the brain.

So if I asked you what you had for dinner last night or where did you live as a teenager, you go there. It is a place which is not a place, it is a potential. And that potential is a field of possibility waves. It is a potential where uncertainty and chaos and ambiguity proliferate. It's a place where everything is connected with everything else.

There is something of an observer effect there, which means that unless you consciously have an intention, you don't convert it into an experience - it remains as consciousness. So I think based on our beliefs -- our social, cultural, spiritual, religious indoctrination -- we create our own reality now. We create our own reality there. So we actually meet with our expectations.

Just like you can't cross the street or tie your shoelaces without first imagining to do so. You can't create anything unless you first conceive it, construct it and then become it. Consciousness is the raw material of everything, whether we call it this life, afterlife or reincarnation. So there are as many versions of it as there are beliefs, cultural ideas and spiritual traditions. They're all equally true in the sense they're all projections -- they're all equally illusions.

 

Q: So where does that leave concepts such as good and evil, heaven and hell?

A: Just like we create good and evil, heaven and hell in Portland, Oregon, we do the same thing in other dimensions of existence. They are projections of our collective psyche. If you're violent, in an abusive relationship or taking drugs, you're likely to hang out with similar people, and you're going to say "This is hell." So we have heavens and hells right here. Good and evil are nothing more than the opposing forces that make experience. If you didn't have opposing forces, you wouldn't have any experience.

 

Q: Since death is the ultimate sanction for controlling populations, what do you think would be the implications for the church and the state if people were no longer to fear death?

A: I don't think of it that way. I think if people no longer are afraid of death, then they're free to create more expanded reality. And in that expanded reality, because it is more conscious, more in the direction of evolution, there is the nurturing of what we call truth, goodness, harmony, beauty - all those things that we aspire to. So the loss of the fear of death would create more freedom to have expanded consciousness. Death is the way the universe recreates itself.

 

Q: You use the word "person" as opposed to localized consciousness.

A: Individuals ... where's the individual? What we call an individual is a constantly evolving, changing, transforming bundle of consciousness, meaning, context, relationships and archetypal stories. At the deepest level they are totally impersonal, you know.

Your thoughts are not your own, they are recycled information. Your body is not your own, it is recycled molecules. Your emotions are not your own, they're recycled energies. Your personality is not your own, it's recycled relationships. We have this illusion that "I'm a fixed entity," and thank God you're not, because then you would be fossilized.

So in the deeper reality, the only liberation is to realize that you're everything and that you can manifest as anything, and they're all equally yours. To say, "This is mine," and "me" is an illusion that we can perpetuate lifetime after lifetime. Such is the mechanism of consciousness, that if you're attached to it you can have it, even in our afterlife, just as we have it right now. But that's not liberation. Ultimately liberation is to go beyond that.

 

Q: It makes me pause to contemplate because I had worked so hard to get to the stage where I can say I am an editor or a publisher.

A: Yes, labels. They only limit you. Rumi has a poem: "Label me, define me, and you'll starve yourself of yourself. Nail me down in a box with cold words and that box will be a coffin. Because I don't know who I am, I'm your own voice echoing off the walls of God." That last bit means that we are what others perceive us to be, but the walls of God are infinite, so we are as many things as people have perceptions of us. It's very interesting how we create this reality through labels and definitions.

 

Q: What could you suggest to help people on their path?

A: There are four fundamental human activities: being, feeling, thinking and doing. Being usually means the stillness that comes from reflection, contemplation, prayer, meditation. Feeling has to do with love and compassion, inspiration, intuition, insight and imagination. Thinking has to do with trying to figure it out scientifically. And doing has to do with effortless spontaneity in action rather than planning and anticipating, and all the stress that comes from that. You just do what needs to be done and leave the results to the unknown. That is karma yoga. These four basic ways of functioning in the world can lead you to freedom. It's not a thing that should involve effort. Then it's not the harmony and the flow of the universe.

 

Q: You're a great proponent of meditation. What does that give an individual?

A: It gives, over a period of time, the ability to become the silent witness of your thoughts, of your behavior, of your biology, of your dreams, so you have a clear sense that you are not your body or mind or its activities. You're the ever-present witnessing awareness in which those activities arise or subside.

 

Q: Humanity has struggled with the fundamental questions of life and death. How does your interpretation support or differ from other wisdom traditions?

A: Mine is consistent with Vedanta, more than anything else, and it is supported by some of the new science looking into the nature of what we call discontinuity. But Vedanta can be summarized into a single sentence, and that is that the ground of being, which is consciousness, differentiates into everything we call reality. That includes cognition, perception, moods, emotions, behavior, biology, social interactions, personal relationships, environment and the forces of nature.

Deepak Chopra, author of Life After Death: The Burden of Proof, posts stories from the book daily on his blog at www.choprablog.com. The blog serves the global community by providing a platform for dialogue, debate and action around topics such as the environment, economy, conflict resolution, human rights, business and technology, spirituality, health and healing. Visit www.chopra.com.