Two Mysteries Everyone Needs to Solve

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Solving the mystery of reality is left to experts, which is nothing new. The explanations of the cosmos is assigned to physicists today as it was assigned to theologians in an age of faith. In some ways modern people are even less interested in the topic. Your soul isn’t likely to be in jeopardy if you don’t accept the Big Bang.

In a new book titled Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, I hope to change this indifferent attitude by showing that the mystery of reality is actually personal. You are the same mystery as the cosmos. My argument isn’t religious or scientific, however. It is based on consciousness, and it begins with a common experience: eating a meal.

See yourself sitting down to breakfast with a plate of eggs and toast in front of you (you can actually do this exercise with your next breakfast). See if you can look at the food simply as shapes and colors; this isn’t hard to do. As you take your first bite, let the taste and smell register without interpreting them as food. This is a bit harder, but imagine that you come from a society that has no eggs or toast, and someone has told you to put these foreign substances in your mouth. At the same time, focus on the sound of chewing and the texture of these substances on your tongue.

The point here is to realize something simple but quite basic. When you were an infant, you had no mental constructs called “food, eggs, toast, sight, taste, texture, and smell.” You experienced eggs and toast directly. The experience preceded the mental constructs. Quickly you learned these concepts, and of course they are very useful. Very young infants in a highchair will splash around their food, throw it on the floor, and treat it generally as a plaything. None of this is acceptable, or even makes sense in the everyday world (except for food fights at school, where food becomes weaponized, itself a mental construct).

Without the mental constructs surrounding breakfast, what is actually present are you and the reality of your experience. There is nothing more fundamental, and the two are inseparable. You cannot have knowledge of breakfast without experiencing it; therefore, breakfast depends on your direct experience.

This simple example has far-reaching consequences. Look out the window as the outside world. If it is daytime imagine seeing the stars at night. Nothing you see has any reality without you being meshed into the experience of it. A skeptic…