The Book of Secrets: Unlocking the Hidden Dimensions of Your Life

by Deepak Chopra

  Secret #14

  THE MEANING OF LIFE IS EVERYTHING

  HAVE WE COME CLOSER to answering the ultimate question, “What is the meaning of life?” Imagine for a moment that someone came up with an answer. Directly or indirectly, most of the traditional answers have crossed everyone’s path; the meaning of life usually comes down to a higher purpose, such as:

  To glorify God

  To glorify God’s creation

  To love and be loved

  To be true to oneself

  As with many other spiritual questions, I find it difficult to imagine how these answers could be tested. If someone holds down a good job, supports his or her family, pays taxes, and obeys the law, is that an example of glorifying God or of being true to oneself? In times of great crisis, such as war, does the meaning of life change? Perhaps it is all one can do to stay alive and be reasonably happy in a crisis.

  One way to test the answer to the question “What is the meaning of life?” would be to write it down, seal it in an envelope, and mail it to a thousand people picked at random. If the answer is right, anyone who opens the envelope would read what is written and say, “Yes, you’re right. That’s the meaning of life.” A breathless young bride would agree on her wedding day. A paralyzed old man would agree on his deathbed. People who war bitterly over differences in politics and religion would agree, and so would those who enjoy a marriage of the mind.

  This might seem like an impossible test, however, since there might be absolutely no answer that would satisfy everyone. But what if the piece of paper is blank, or if it said, “The meaning of life is everything”? In the one reality, these aren’t trick answers but very close to each other in reading the truth. The blank piece of paper indicates that life is pure potential until someone shapes it into something. The meaning of pure potential is that life is infinitely open. Similarly, to say that the meaning of life is everything indicates that life leaves nothing and no one out. “Everything” is just another way to embrace the infinite range of possibilities.

  Life refuses to be pinned down. Whatever meaning you want the universe to reflect, it provides. In medieval Europe, people wanted the universe to reflect their intense belief in the Holy Trinity; at that same period in history, people in India wanted the universe to reflect the cosmic dance of Shiva and his consort Shakti. Wherever Islam held sway, the universe was expected to reflect the will of Allah. Right now, agnostics expect the universe to reflect their own spiritual confusion and doubt; therefore, the cosmos seems to be a random explosion that began with the Big Bang. Many religious people accept this reality, except on Sunday, when the universe feebly reflects the possibility of a divine maker.

  If you try to pin the universe down to one reflection, you pin your own life down at the same time. Reality is like a two-way mirror that shows you yourself as well as what lies on the other side. This mutual effect is mandated because the universe doesn’t possess one set of facts. You the observer bring your version of reality into being. Let me offer an example of how the two-way mirror works in the field of medicine.

  It seems completely baffling that the human body can be healed in so many ways. If you take almost any disease like cancer, there is a typical history that the illness usually follows. Breast cancer, for example, has a known survival rate from the time of the first detected anomaly in the breast cells. Women who contract the disease will fall somewhere on the bell curve of survival. As one oncologist told me years ago, cancer is a numbers game. A statistical range will tell you at what age the disease is most likely to occur. The response of tumors to different modes of radiation and chemotherapy is constantly being documented. With these facts in hand, medicine proceeds to find a definitive cure, and if the definitive cure hasn’t been found yet, science will keep working until it is.

  Outside the statistical norm, however, strange things are happening. In my own medical experience, I have met the following patients:

  • A young woman who told me that her mother, living on a farm in remote Vermont, developed a large tumor in her breast but decided that she was too busy to get it treated. She survived more than a decade without medical attention.

  • A woman who felt a lump in her breast and decided to visualize it away. She saw hordes of white cells descending like snow to engulf the lump. After she performed this visualization for six months the lump was gone.

  • A woman with a massive tumor checked out of the hospital a day before surgery because she didn’t want to approach her condition out of fear and panic. She returned months later only when she felt confident of her survival. The operation succeeded and she did survive.

  Every doctor has encountered the opposite side of the spectrum, women who die very quickly after receiving news of a small number of malignant cells in their breast. (In some cases, the cells are anomalous, meaning that they might be harmless, yet in a few women these anomalies quickly turn into tumors. This phenomenon was tagged long ago as “dying from the diagnosis.”) I am not making recommendations about how to approach cancer, only observing that the disease often seems to reflect the beliefs brought to it by the patient. A now-famous study by David Siegel at Stanford took a group of women who had late-stage breast cancer and divided them into two groups. One group was given the best medical care, which by that point was very little. The other group sat down once a week and shared their feelings about having the disease. This alone produced a remarkable result. After two years, all the long-term survivors belonged to the second group, and the overall survival in that group was half again as long as in the group that didn’t discuss their feelings. In essence, the women who confronted their emotions were able to shift the reflection in the mirror.

  The human body runs on dual controls. If you heal it from the outside by material means, it will respond. If you heal it from the inside by subjective means, it will also respond. How can it be that talking about your feelings can have as much effect as a powerful cancer drug (or even more)? The answer is that consciousness always takes these two roads. It unfolds objectively as the visible universe and subjectively as events inside the mind. Both are the same consciousness. The same intelligence has put on two masks, differentiating into the world “out there” and the one “in here.” So the wisps of feeling that arise in a cancer patient communicate with the body much like the molecules of a drug.

  This phenomenon isn’t remarkable anymore—all of mind-body medicine is based on the discovery of messenger molecules that begin in the brain as thoughts, beliefs, wishes, fears, and desires. The breakthrough will come when medicine stops giving all the credit to molecules. When Mozart wanted to compose a new symphony, his intention called up the necessary brain function. It would be absurd to say that Mozart’s brain wanted to write a symphony first and produced messenger molecules to inform him of the fact. Awareness always comes first, and its projections, both objective and subjective, follow.

  This brings us to a new principle that is crucially important, called “simultaneous interdependent co-arising.” Simultaneous because one thing doesn’t cause another. Interdependent because each aspect is coordinated with every other. Co-arising because every separate part comes from the same source.

  When Mozart wanted to compose a symphony, everything associated with his creation happened simultaneously: the idea, the notes, the sound in his head, the necessary brain activity, the signals to his hands as they wrote the music down. All these ingredients were organized into one experience, and they arose together. It would be false to say that one caused the other.

  If one element should fall out of place, the whole project would collapse. Should Mozart get depressed, his emotional state will block the music. Should he get physically exhausted, fatigue will block the music. One can think of a hundred ways that disorder could disrupt the picture: Mozart could have had marital problems, a stroke or heart attack, a sudden artistic block, or the noisy distraction of a two-year-old in the house.

  Creation is kept from anarchy by simultane
ous co-arising.

  The cosmos matches the human mind far too closely to ignore. It’s as if the universe were putting on its mind-boggling show of galaxies exploding from nothingness only to tease us. It makes no sense that a process spanning billions of light years and expanding with unbelievable speed to generate trillions of stars should climax with the appearance of human DNA. Why did the universe need us to look on in wonder? Perhaps it’s because reality just works that way: The unfolding cosmic drama exists simultaneously with the human brain, an instrument so finely attuned that it can delve into any level of nature. We are the ultimate audience. Nothing gets past us, no matter how minuscule or vast.

  Now an extraordinary answer is beginning to dawn: Maybe we are putting on the whole show ourselves. The meaning of life is everything because we demand nothing less than the universe as our playground.

  Quantum physics long ago conceded that the observer is the deciding factor in every observation. An electron has no fixed position in space until someone looks for it, and then the electron pops up precisely where it was looked for. Until that moment, it only exists as a wave propagating everywhere through space. That wave could collapse into a particle anywhere. Every single atom in the universe has a minute probability of being located as far away as possible or as near as possible.

  The universe runs on a switch with only two positions, on and off. “On” is the material world with all its events and objects. “Off” is pure possibility, the changing room where particles go when no one is looking. The “on” position can be controlled only by external means. Once you light it up, the physical universe behaves by a set of rules. But if you catch it in the “off” position, the universe can be changed without regard for time and space. Nothing is heavy and immovable in the “off” position because there are no objects. Nothing is close or far away. Nothing is trapped in the past, present, or future. The “off” position is pure potential. There, your body is a set of possibilities waiting to happen, and present, too, are all those possibilities that have already happened and those that might happen. In the “off” position, everything in creation collapses down to a point, and miraculously, you live at that point; it is your source.

  “On” and “off” don’t give quite an accurate picture, however. Just as there are many degrees of physical reality, there are many degrees of nonphysical reality. Your body is a solid object, a swirl of atoms, a storm of subatomic particles, and a ghost of energy, all at the same time. These states are simultaneous, but each operates according to different rules. In physics, this jumbled set of rules is called a “tangled hierarchy.” The word hierarchy indicates that the levels are stacked in a certain order. Your body is in no danger of flying apart into random atoms because, in the hierarchy of things, solid objects stay in place, but in truth you are a cloud of electrons and a probability wave and everything in between.

  That is the “on” position. In the “off” position, the same tangle continues but is totally out of sight. The invisible domain is divided in strange ways. At one level, events are all merged. Beginnings and endings meet; nothing happens without affecting everything else. But at another level, some events are more important than others; some can be controlled while others may float around with only the weakest kind of causation. By analogy, look inside your mind: Some thoughts demand to be acted on while others are passing whims; some follow strict logic while others obey very loose associations. Events in the universe are exactly the same mixed bag of potential events. If you want to, you can dive deep into the “off” position and start bringing up the events you want. You have to be prepared to meet the tangled hierarchy head on, however, because every event you might want to change is enmeshed in every other event. Still, there are certain conditions that remain the same.

  DIVING INTO PURE POTENTIAL

  How to Navigate the Field of Everything

  1. The deeper you go, the more power is available to change things.

  2. Reality flows from more subtle regions to more gross ones.

  3. The easiest way to change anything is to first go to the subtlest level of it, which is awareness.

  4. Still silence is the beginning of creativity. Once an event starts to vibrate, it has already begun to enter the visible world.

  5. Creation proceeds by quantum leaps.

  6. The beginning of an event is simultaneously its ending. The two co-arise in the domain of silent awareness.

  7. Events unfold in time but are born outside of time.

  8. The easiest way to create is in the evolutionary direction.

  9. Since possibilities are infinite, evolution never ends.

  10. The universe corresponds to the nervous system that is looking at it.

  Exploring these conditions is the way you create the meaning of your own life. Let me compress these ten points into a sketch, leaving you to fill it in: The entire universe since the Big Bang behaves the way it does in order to conform to the human nervous system. If we could experience the cosmos any other way, it would be a different cosmos. The universe is lightless to a blind cave fish, which has evolved to exclude anything visual. The universe has no sound to an amoeba, no taste to a tree, no smell to a snail. Each creature selects its own range of manifestation according to its range of potential.

  The universe is forced to respect your boundaries. Just as no literal vision of beauty can affect a blind cave fish and no sweetness of perfume entices a snail, any aspect of life that lies outside your boundaries will not hold meaning for you. You are like a hunter-gatherer searching the forest for food. Unless a plant is edible, you pass it by, and thus a forest full of exotic flora would be empty to you. The force of evolution is infinite, but it can work only with what the observer brings to it. A mind closed off to love, for example, will look out on a loveless world and be immune to any evidence of love, while an open mind will look out on that same world and find infinite expressions of love.

  If our boundaries told the whole story, evolution could never break through them. This is where quantum leaps come in. Every observer creates a version of reality that is bound up in certain meanings and energies. As long as those meanings seem valid, the energies hold the picture together. But when the observer wants to see something new, meaning collapses, energies combine in a new way, and the world takes a quantum leap. The leap occurs on the visible plane when the switch is “on,” but it was prepared in the invisible domain when the switch is “off.”

  Here’s an example: Our ability to read came into being when prehistoric man developed a cerebral cortex, yet no one in the prehistoric world needed to read. If evolution is as random as many geneticists argue it is, the ability to read should have disappeared a million years ago, since its usefulness for survival was zero.

  But this trait survived for the creature who was emerging. Consciousness knows what is to come, and it builds into every particle of creation the potential not just for one unfolding future but for any future. Nature doesn’t have to predict what is going to happen on every level. It just opens avenues of growth, and then a given creature—in this case us—makes the leap when the time feels right. As long as potential is alive, the future can evolve by choice.

  On several occasions, a sharp-eyed person spots a flaw in what I’ve been saying. “You’re contradicting yourself. On the one hand, you claim that cause and effect go on eternally. Now you’re saying that the end is already present at the beginning. Which is it?” Well, it’s both. That doesn’t seem like a very satisfying answer—it certainly makes sharp-eyed critics frown. But the universe is using cause and effect to get somewhere. When it wants to take a quantum leap, cause and effect get molded to the purpose. (Actually, you experience this every second. When you see the color red in your mind’s eye, your brain cells are emitting signals in a precise way. But you didn’t order them to do that; they fell into line automatically with your thought.)

  In the tangled hierarchy, an amoeba, a snail, a galaxy, a black hole, and a quark are equally valid exp
ressions of life. Prehistoric people were as immersed in their reality as we are in ours, equally fascinated by it, and equally privileged to watch reality unfold. Evolution gives each creature exactly the world that fits its ability to perceive. But there is something above all else that needs to evolve: the gap. If you aren’t ready yet to accept that the meaning of life is everything, find your own meaning in closing the gap. Fetch the world back from the brink of disaster; steer the future off a collision course with chaos. Dharma, the upholding force in Nature, will support any thought, feeling, or action that closes the gap because the universe is set up to fuse the observer and the observed.

  Because you are self-aware, your fate is unity. It has been built into your brain as surely as the ability to read was built into the brain of Cro-Magnon man. As the gap closes, modern people will find themselves merging with higher and lower forms of life. All generations of humanity, from the first hominid to whatever comes after us, will be seen as one. And then what? I imagine we will take the picture off the wall, detaching ourselves from any fixed image. To live from the level of pure existence, without the need to be bound by any event in the physical world, is the end of this journey and the beginning of one never before seen. This will be the arrival of unity and the final stroke of freedom.

  CHANGING YOUR REALITY TO ACCOMMODATE THE FOURTEENTH SECRET