By Deepak Chopra
Deepak Chopra is a practicing endocrinologist who was born in India. He combines Eastern spirituality, traditional medicine, and physics to provide a holistic view of health and aging. He demonstrates the true connectedness of nature by combining physical science and spirituality. Who would have seen these two seemingly separate topics as one package complimentary knowledge?
We humans have always sought to unravel the secrets of aging. According to Chopra, we’ve spent most of our collective planet time looking in the wrong places. Scientists have long pried and examined the body seeking answers to eternal questions about the mystery of aging. Chopra suggests that the answers lie in our consciousness, not in our bodies. Teacher comment: Excellent point. Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, we’ve had the power and the answers within us all the time. It’s empowering just to imagine the power over our physical and spiritual lives within us.
Dr. Chopra combines mind-body medicine with current anti-aging studies to demonstrate how aging’s negative effects can be prevented. Over the last thirty years, hundreds of research findings have verified the fact that aging is very individual and that there’s no definite line between psychology and biology. He says we can learn to redirect how are bodies metabolize time. If we want to intervene in aging process, we must do it “at the level where belief becomes biology,” here, we can attain our “unbounded potential.” Teacher comment: Interesting position. The secret to diminishing the signs and symptoms of aging lies simply in our perception.
It’s our social conditioning, our collective worldview, “the old paradigm,” (3) our way of seeing things that he calls, “’the hypnosis of social conditioning’, an induced fiction in which we have collectively agreed to participate.”(3). Our bodies are aging as we have programmed them through our collective conditioning. We can actually rewrite our own developmental software and by reprogramming our perceptions of reality.
“Our cells are constantly eavesdropping on our thoughts and being changed by them.”(5). Falling in love can boost the immune system. Our immunity can be destroyed by depression. Teacher comment: True. Despair increases the risk for a heart attack or getting cancer, where as, joy keeps us healthy and extends life. Just the act of remembering a past stressful event stimulates the flow of destructive hormones, the same reaction caused by the stressful event itself. We have the ability to speed up, slow down, or even reverse aging with our minds.
Your entire world can change, including your body, by a simple adjustment in your perception. Teacher comment: Yes. Mandatory retirement can be deadly for many men. The day before your sixty five you’re valued and seen as socially useful, the very next day your a societal dependent. The incidence of heart attacks, cancer, and early death in previously healthy men soars within the first few years after retirement. On the other hand, in societies where old age is accepted and valued, elders stay vigorous. Teacher comment: No doubt.
Our current assumptions about aging don’t define our reality, they were interventions of the human mind that we converted into rules. If we’re going to challenge aging we have to change our worldview because nothing holds more power over our physicality than our beliefs. The underlying reason that old people feel marginal, devalued, and cut off from mainstream activity is because they lack positive images of aging.
Quantum physicists, like Einstein, have known for almost a hundred years that our perception of the physical world is wrong. It reminds me of the very old belief that we clung to for so long, the belief that the world was flat. It took a very long time for the human race to evolve away from that false belief. Our worldview creates our individual world that’s unlike anyone else’s. We are squeezed into a body and a lifetime, by the rules of cause and effect that we accept.
In actuality, life is unbounded. At the deepest level our bodies are ageless, our minds are timeless. Einstein realized that time and space were products of our senses. He and his colleges were able to see beyond this mirage. They reassembled time and space into a new geometry without beginning, end, edges, or solidity. They discovered that every solid particle was a bundle of energy vibrating in a huge void. The advantage of this worldview is that it is infinitely creative.
Chopra thinks that it’s liberating to know that you can change your world and your body via a perceptual adjustment. Old cells serve as maps of your experience, your suffering gets imprinted on your cellular memory along with your joy. Stresses you forgot about consciously still send signals like imbedded microchips that make you anxious, tense, or fatigued because they cross the mind-body barrier – they become a part of you. By seventy, experiences processed and metabolized by your tissues and organs are seen externally in cellular changes. Teacher comment: Interesting concept.
The act of paying attention to your body’s functions, instead of leaving them on autopilot, will change how you age. When we love the miracle of who we are beyond social classifications we create health for our mind and body. One example is biofeedback and meditation that has been used to teach people to lower their blood pressure or their stomach acids. Teacher comment: Good point.
Quantum physics tells us that our atoms are 99.9999 percent empty space. Our subatomic particles are just bundles of vibrating energy that carry information, not solid matter. Since the Big Bang the quantum field holds the universe in unexpressed form, similar to how are we hold thousands of words silently in our memories. All the essential stuff of the universe, all that we can see, feel, and hear, including our bodies, is actually non-stuff. It’s not ordinary non-stuff, it’s thinking non-stuff.
The basic emotion fear, isn’t just an abstract feeling, it’s also a tangible molecule of adrenaline. Teacher comment: True. Without the hormone there’s no feeling, without the feeling there’s no hormone. Transmitting pain works the same way, there won’t be any pain without nerve signals to transmit the pain. There’s no pain relief without endorphins to block the signals. Mind-body medicine was based on the discovery that where ever a thought goes, a chemical goes with it. This helps to explain why a recently widowed woman is twice as likely to develop breast cancer and why people who are chronically depressed are four times as likely to develop physical illnesses. Both examples illustrate how psychological pain can be converted into the biochemicals that lead to dis-ease. This knowledge points to the vitalness of our work as counselors in helping our clients feel better emotionally, we are also helping them maintain healthy bodies. Teacher comment: Yes.
The placebo effect allows a sugar pill to relieve pain the same way a real narcotic does. The same thing has been done with chemotherapy for cancer patients. Patients with advanced malignancies have gone into remission after receiving only sterile saline solutions, but were told it was a powerful anti-cancer drug. Our bodies are capable of producing any biochemical response if the mind is given the correct suggestion. The power of the placebo is in the suggestion that is converted into the body’s intention to cure itself. Chopra suggest, why not skip the sugar pill and go directly to the intention?
We could trigger the intention not to age and the body would carry it automatically. Intention is actively partnered with attention, which can enable us to convert automatic processes into conscious ones. We age the way we do because we all expect to do so. We’ve unwittingly set up a self-defeating intention with our unwavering belief that our mind-body automatically carries out. These intentions have created obsolete programming in us, but we can reprogram our intentions consciously.
The image of our bodies in Western medicine is that they’re mindless machines, despite unquestionable evidence that this is not true. It has been proven that death rates from cancer and heart disease are higher in people with psychological distress. A Yale study found that breast cancer spread fastest among women with repressed personalities, felt hopeless, and were unable to express negative emotions. There have been similar findings with asthma, arthritis, intractable pain and other disorders. A Stanford psychiatrist studied eighty six women with advanced breast cancer. Half received weekly psychotherapy and lessons in self-hypnosis. It had been thought, what could a woman do to combat a fatal disease in an hour’s therapy a week, shared with other patients? After following these women for ten years Dr. Spiegel was stunned to learn that the group receiving therapy survived on average twice as long as those without therapy. Doubly telling was the fact that only three of the women were still alive – all had been in the therapy group. This study is amazing because the researcher didn’t expect any effect at all. Over the last decade many other researchers have come up with similar findings. Teacher comment: Unquestionable evidence.
Medical journals overwhelmingly preach about the inherent biology of disease, thoughts, feelings and attitudes are just along for the ride. The new paradigm teaches us that emotions aren’t just fleeting events isolated in mental space, they’re expressions of awareness – the fundamental stuff of life. All religions teach that the breath of life is spirit. To raise or lower one’s spirits means something fundamental that the body must reflect.
Perception is a learned phenomenon. Our bodies are the physical results of all the interpretations we’ve learned to make since birth. Transplant patients describe participation in donors memories. One woman who received a heart/lung transplant awoke craving beer and Chicken McNuggets that she had never craved before. She also dreamed a man named Timmy would come to her. She tracked down the donor’s family and learned that he was killed in a traffic accident on his way home from McDonalds. He was also very fond of beer. Our experience becomes our bodies. This women that Chopra spoke about was on the Oprah Winfrey show. They referred to this phenomenon that happens to many transplant recipients as cellular memory.
Defiant of medical science which says that growth hormone is preprogrammed in DNA, children who have felt unloved have stopped developing. A condition called, psychological dwarfism. Severely abused kids convert lack of love into a growth hormone deficiency. The cure – loving foster parents who transform the child’s beliefs which can produce bursts of the hormone. Learning to see themselves differently is reflected in their bodies. Teacher comment: Yes.
Awareness can heal and destroy depending on how it’s trained. We have been conditioned to think that we have no choice to see aging differently. Our bodies conform to unconscious messages in our heads that say, “I must age”. We grow old and die because that’s what we see others do. This physical process is so universal it appears to be inevitable. Aging is how our bodies respond to social conditioning. If aging is something that’s happening to you then you’re a victim of it, but if aging is learned, then we can unlearn this behavior.
Many different kinds of studies have shown that the support of family and friends can make a difference in our health at times of stress. Teacher comment: Yes. Auto workers who received support were less likely to develop physical or mental symptoms. Pregnant women experience ninety one percent less serious complications of pregnancy when they have support. Gerontologists put a group of elderly nursing home residents, ages eighty seven to ninety six, on a weight training program. Within eight weeks wasted muscles came back three hundred percent, coordination and balance improved and their overall sense of an active returned. Beyond the physical, they regained dignity.
A Harvard psychologist studied one hundred eighty five men (students at Harvard during WWII) and monitored their health for forty years. Those who reacted poorly to stress (i.e. depression) were more likely to die prematurely. Aging was retarded by good mental health and accelerated by poor mental health. The results of mental health show up in the fifties, a perilous time when premature heart attacks, high blood pressure and cancer show up. Teacher comment: Yes.
Giving birth generates a flood of powerful hormones that provide a surge of energy through the body. If a woman has healthy memories of childhood this energy is used in establishing a strong bond to the baby. Sad childhood memories triggers old programming which changes the joy into apathy and fatigue. Postpartum depression is the result of outworn memories seizing a new lease on life. Chopra doesn’t recommend anti-depressant drugs because when the drugs are taken away the depression returns. He suggests psychotherapy even though it takes longer and requires more insight and courage. Teacher comment: Interesting point.
A US study tested female runners to see if hard exercise prevented osteoporosis. The best prevention is not calcium or hormone replacement, but building bone density with exercise in the younger years with exercise. A study of runners also showed increased bone density in their arms. At the quantum level, the whole skeleton got the message to deposit more calcium to the bones. The whole body knew exercise was happening.
A scientist named Backster found that cells removed from the body and placed in another room react to the same stimuli that the person does. He applied a polygraph on cells scraped from the inside of the mouth and they reacted in the same way as the person did in another room. At the source of intelligence, there’s little difference between thoughts and molecules. Another demonstration of cellular memory! Teacher comment: Really?
Words, unlike the promise of childhood songs, can and do hurt us because they cause hormones to be secreted in response. Words of love transform us. Child psychologists have learned that children are more deeply influenced by ascriptive statements such as, You’re a bad boy”, or “You’re a liar”, than prescriptive ones such as, “Wash your hands before eating.” Telling her what she is, makes a deeper impression than telling her what to do. The mind-body system is actually organized around such verbal experiences. Wounds delivered can create for more permanent effects than physical trauma, for we literally create ourselves out of these words. Teacher comment: True.
Words have the power to program awareness, so it’s important to avoid passively accepting negative connotations that the word old carries. (I might add words and phrases like: faggot, dumb blonde, girl talk, nigger, kike, bull dyke, whop, polock, all the societal images that harm some aspect of humanity).
Chopra thinks that nothing makes people age more than fear, second only to grief. Every doctor has witnessed the appalling deterioration of a spouse that has been widowed. It’s not that death is a fiction, but that our belief in it creates limitations where none need exist. Teacher comment: I agree.
Meditation’s use for stress held little appeal for Western medicine until the early seventies when physiologists at UCLA proved that along with its spiritual implications, it had profound effects on the body and creates changes in breathing, heartbeat and blood pressure. This researcher also showed that long term practice of meditation actually reversed the effects of aging.
Psychologists are beginning to verify that human development extends into old age through higher states of awareness, such as wisdom. Many believe the notion that any decline in the brain’s physicality with age is offset be new mental accomplishments. Creativity researchers say artists can come up with more ideas in their sixties and seventies than in their twenties and the later you take up the creative pursuit the more likely you are to pursue it into old age. PET scans show increased blood flow to the brain during periods of creative thought illustrating that creative experience may enhance brain structure itself. Julia Child came to television when she was past mid-life.
A Harvard psychologist studied the physiology of love. A group of people viewed a movie of Mother Teresa doing her work among the sick and poor which displayed a profound outpouring of love. While they watched, their immune systems increased, SIgA or a salivary immunoglobulin antigen which indicates a high level of immune response. (Also characteristic of people who have recently fallen in love). Teacher comment: The philosophy of emotion. Despite the fact that all audience members had this positive immune response, some expressed objections centering on differences such as religious or being disturbed by the sight of starving children. Their physical response to love was more powerful than their rational attitudes. It brings to my mind the question, what effect does racism, sexism, homophobia and violence have on our immune system? What are the effects on aging to those us who life in a culture separated by stratifications that include issues such as gender, race, and class? Surely these separations in our humanity lack an outpouring of love. Teacher comment: Good questions.
When we accept our parents belief system about aging, we agree to fear death, because its thought of as the end. But, perhaps there is no ending. Birth and death are time-space events, existence is not. If we look inside us, we find a faint but certain memory that we have always been. No one remembers not existing. The deepest questions about who we are and what life means are wrapped up in our notion of existence. It’s fear reaches much further into our lives than our conscious minds are willing to admit. When you say you fear death, you’re saying you fear you haven’t lived your true life, which cloaks the world in silent suffering. When the spell of mortality is broken we can release the fear that gives death it’s power. Seeing ourselves in terms of timeless, deathless Beings, has the power to awaken every cell to a new existence.
This new paradigm provides us with a concept that connects body, mind, and spirit into a unity. The later years should be a time when life becomes whole. The circle closes and life’s purpose is fulfilled. In that regard, active mastery is not just a way to survive extreme old age—it’s the road to freedom. Teacher comment: I like that!
Aging can also be said to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. You expect to be withdrawn, isolated, and useless when you age and you create the very conditions to justify these beliefs. Teacher comment: Yes! Our deepest assumptions are triggers for the physical changes we know so well.
He wrote the book with the hope of taking the subject so fraught with fear – aging, and turning it into a vehicle for fulfillment. Humans aren’t really trapped in time, squeezed into the volume of a body and the span of a lifetime, we’re voyagers on the infinite river of life. He recommends using love as our mirror of timelessness, letting it nurture our certainty that we are beyond change, beyond memory of yesterday and the dream of tomorrow.
Chopra’s ideas give me hope for humanity. I’m hopeful that if aging is a product of social learning, then it’s also possible that concepts such as racial, gender and sexual inequality are learned myths that can also be reconceived in ways that will prevent them from artificially separating humanity. Surely the wisps of intelligence that Chopra envisions harbor true global family values, such as tolerance, non-violence, acceptance, egalitarism, altruism, values that offer hope to heal all of humanity. If we can come to see ourselves differently, surely we can also see others differently than we do. I believe that his ideas about the possibilities of human development will find ways to overcome man’s inhumanity to man.
We Must Discard These Ten Assumptions:
1. There is an objective world independent of the observer, our bodies are an aspect of this objective world.
2. The body is composed of clumps of matter separated from one another in time and space.
3. Mind and body are separate and independent from each other.
4. Materialism is primary, consciousness is secondary. In other words, we are physical machines that have learned to think.
5. Human awareness can be completely explained as the product of biochemistry.
6. As individuals, we are disconnected, self-contained entities.
7. Our perception of the world is automatic and gives us an accurate picture of how things really are.
8. Time exists as an absolute, and we are captives of that absolute. No one escapes the ravages of time.
9. Our true nature is totally defines by the body, ego, and personality. We are wisps of memories and desires enclosed in packages of flesh and bones.
10. Suffering is necessary—it is part of reality. We are inevitable victims of sickness, aging, and death.
Ten New Assumptions:
1. The physical world, including our bodies, is a response of the observer. We create our bodies as we create the experience of our world.
2. In their essential state, our bodies are composed of energy and information, not solid matter. This energy and information is an outcropping of infinite fields of energy and information spanning the universe.
3. The mind and body are inseparably one. The unity that is “me” separates into two streams of experience. I experience the subjective stream as thoughts, feelings and desires. I experience the objective stream as my body. At a deeper level, however, the two streams meet at a single creative source. It’s from this source that we are meant to live.
4. The biochemistry of the body is a product of awareness. Beliefs, thoughts and emotions create the chemical reactions that uphold life in every cell. An aging cell is the end product of awareness that has forgotten how to remain new.
5. Perception appears to be automatic, but in fact it is a learned phenomenon. The world you live in, including the experience of your body, is completely dictated by how you learned to perceive it. If you change your perception, you change the experience of your body and your world.
6. Impulses of intelligence create your body in new forms every second. What you are is the sum total of these impulses, and by changing their patterns, you will change.
7. Although each person seems separate and independent, all of us are connected to patterns of intelligence that govern the whole cosmos. Our bodies are part of a universal body, our minds an aspect of a universal mind.
8. Time does not exist as an absolute, but only eternity. Time is quantified eternity, timelessness chopped up into bits and pieces (seconds, hours, days, years) by us. What we call linear time is a reflection of how we perceive change. If we could perceive the changeless, time would cease to exist as we know it. We can learn to start metabolizing non-change, eternity, the absolute. By doing that, we will be ready to create the physiology of immortality.
9. Each of us inhabits a reality lying beyond all change. Deep inside us, unknown to the five senses, is an inner-most core of being, a field of non-change that creates personality, ego, and body. This being is our essential state—it is who we really are.
10. We are not victims of aging, sickness, and death. These are part of the scenery, not the seer, who is immune to any form of change. This seer is the spirit, the expression of eternal being.
Ten Keys to Active Mastery:
1. Listen to your bodies wisdom, which expresses itself through signals of comfort and discomfort. When choosing a certain behavior, ask your body, “How do you feel about this?” If your body sends a signal of physical or emotional distress, watch out. If it sends a message of comfort and eagerness, proceed.
2. Live in the present, it’s the only moment you have. Keep your attention on what is here and now. looking for the fullness in every moment. Accept what comes to you totally and completely so you can appreciate it, learn from it, and then let it go. The present is as it should be. It reflects infinite laws of Nature that have brought you this exact thought, this exact physical response. This moment is as it is because the universe is as it is. Don’t struggle against the infinite scheme of things; instead, be at one with it.
3. Take time to be silent, to meditate, to quiet the internal dialogue. In moments of silence, realize that you are recontacting your source of pure awareness. Pay attention to your inner life so you can be guided by intuition rather than externally imposed interpretations of what is or isn’t good for you.
4. Relinquish your need for external approval. You alone are the judge of your worth, and your goal is to discover infinite worth in yourself, no matter what anyone else think. There is great freedom in this realization.
5. When you find yourself reacting with anger or opposition to any personal circumstances, realize that you are only struggling with yourself. Putting up resistance is the response of defenses created by old hurts. When you relinquish this anger, you will be healing yourself and cooperating with the flow of the universe.
6. Know that the world “out there” reflects your reality “in here.” The people you react to most strongly, whether with love or hate, are projections of your inner world. What you most hate is what you deny in yourself. What you most love is what you wish for yourself. Use the mirror of relationships to guide your evolution. The goal is total self-knowledge. When you achieve that, what you most want will automatically be there, and what you most dislike will disappear.
7. Shed the burden of judgment—you will feel much lighter. Judgment imposes right and wrong on situations that just are. Everything can be understood and forgiven., but when you judge, you cut off understanding and shut down the process of learning to love. In judging others, you reflect your lack of self-acceptance. Remember that every person you forgive adds to your self-love.
8. Don’t contaminate your body with toxins, either through food, drink, or toxic emotions. Your body is more than a life support system. It is the vehicle that will carry your on the journey to your evolution. The health of every cell directly contributes to your state of well being, because every cell is a point of awareness within the field of awareness that is you.
9. Replace fear-motivated behavior with love-motivated behavior. Fear is the product of memory, which dwells in the past. Remembering what hurt us before, we direct our energies toward making certain that our old hurt will not repeat itself. But trying to impose the past on the present will never wipe out the threat of being hurt. That happens only when you find the security of your own being, which is love. Motivated by the truth inside you, you can face any threat because your inner strength is invulnerable to fear.
10. Understand that the physical world is just a mirror of a deeper intelligence. Intelligence is the invisible organizer of all matter and energy, and since a portion of this intelligence resides in you, you share in the organizing power of the cosmos. Because you are inseparably linked to everything, you cannot afford to foul the planet’s air and water. But at a deeper level, you cannot afford to live with a toxic mind, because every thought makes an impression on the whole field of intelligence. Living in balance and purity is the highest good for you and the Earth.
Taken From:
*Chopra, Deepak. (1993). Ageless Body, Timeless Mind: The Quantum Alternative to Growing Old. New York: Harmony Books, pp. 4, 5-7, & 258-260.
Work Cited
Chopra, Deepak. (1993). Ageless Body, Timeless Mind: The Quantum Alternative to Growing Old. New York: Harmony Books.