Why Reality Isn’t Just a Story
By Deepak Chopra, MD, FACP, FRCP
People like to live out storylines, a habit that goes back thousands of years. Everyone has an individual story, one of eight billion as things stand today. But collective stories are more powerful, universal, and long-lasting. If you had been born in any age of recorded history, the dominant story would have been either religious or physical-materialistic.
At the present time, the physical/materialistic story is so dominant, thanks to modern science and technology, that a crucial fact gets lost: All stories are mind-made. We are their source, but when enough people are convinced that a story is absolutely true, we forget this fact. Instead of holding on to our status as creators, we lapse into the subsidiary role of being a character in the story.
One major tradition, however, was free of stories, namely the Vedic tradition in India. Although Hinduism was the offspring of the original Vedic teachings, Vedic knowledge itself is not religious teaching. They teach instead about consciousness. No story is attached, because consciousness is timeless. It has no historic events, turning points, breakthroughs, disasters, triumphs, or loss of self-confidence. Consciousness simply is, like existence itself.
When this truth is lost, the mind fills in the space with stories. A story is whatever you live by that isn’t fully conscious. Of course, the world’s religions and spiritual traditions contain inspiring thoughts, some of them deeply imbued with pure consciousness. By the same token, physical/materialist eras are filled with impressive discoveries that bring subtle levels of Nature to light. But only consciousness knows consciousness. Every other source of knowledge is subsidiary at best, unreliable at worst.
Looking at ourselves now, most people would be shocked to discover that identifying with the physical world is a mistake. Correcting the mistake has enormous implications — it would be like waking up from a dream. If we stop accepting the basic tenet of physicalism — that everything in existence is explainable by exploring the matter and energy that compose the universe — a huge shift is possible. Despite the obvious triumphs of science and technology, we have to abandon the scientific worldview to explain the following mysteries:
It is amazingly hard to prove that the physical world isn’t an illusion. I will number the steps so that each one can be examined and challenged on its own.
1. Nothing is real unless we experience it directly or know about it through rational investigation. If there is anything real outside our ability to experience it, it might as well not exist, because the human brain provides our only interface with reality.
2. Even though science divides objective facts “out there” from subjective activity “in here,” this is only a matter of convenience. Everything comes down to experience. A dream at night is an experience, and so is the sight of billions of galaxies.
3. Until we know what experience is made of, we don’t know how reality is constructed.
4. All the qualities we attribute to the physical world — such as the redness of a rose, its voluptuous fragrance, and its velvety texture — are produced in our consciousness.
5. Without human perception, light isn’t bright, a summer day isn’t hot, and a rose isn’t red. Photons, for example, are invisible when they strike your retina. Sugar is tasteless when it strikes the tongue. A rose has no fragrance when it strikes the nose. These qualities (technically known as qualia) are produced by the mechanism of perception.
6. Thanks to physicalism, we say that perception occurs in the brain, but it doesn’t. There are no pictures inside the brain, no light, no color, no sound. The brain is no more the origin of perception than a radio is the origin of the music being played through it.
7. All we can say reliably is that experience occurs in awareness, is known in awareness, and is made out of awareness. Awareness is the creator and recipient of experience, forming a feedback loop that never escapes the field of awareness.
8. The primacy of awareness can be shown by the fact that even atoms and subatomic particles have no intrinsic qualities. They display their properties according to what the human mind looks for, asks about, identifies, and experiments with. When we think we are reducing matter and energy to their fundamental nature, what we are doing is subdividing our experience into finer slices, nothing more.
9. The mental activity of using our perceptions to define what is real and then interpreting these perceptions creates reality insofar as human beings know it. We tell ourselves a story built from our experiences, and even when we point to laws of nature and mathematical formulas to bolster our story, they, too are experiences.
10. The claim that data, measurements, rational logic, and verifiable experiments have a privileged position is mistaken. Awareness is a single, uniform field, accessed through experience. A scientific fact has the same basis, neither higher nor lower, as our experience of thinking, sensing, intuiting, creating, understanding, knowing, and perceiving.
11. Humans are only one species of consciousness. We have no access, except by inference, to the consciousness of other creatures, which belong to other species of consciousness.
12. A critical factor in our species of consciousness is language. Using words, we label our experiences, and in that way, two things happen: First, the universe is transformed from a unified, unending process into bits and pieces of isolated “stuff,” each bit being assigned a word or label. Second, we build our story of reality by means of labels, even though they are our own, arbitrary creation.
13. The artifacts we employ to keep our story going have the drawback of misleading us about what is real. The whole scheme of Mind-Body-Space-Time-Particles-Forces-Fields are names we invented for shapes, forms, and activities that occur in our awareness. In reality, awareness cannot be trapped inside these categories. It is formless, timeless, boundless, and without a specific location.
14. Since we have grown accustomed to believing in our own story and tagging everything in nature with a fixed name, we’ve lost sight of what exists beyond this tapestry of Maya: formless awareness, which gives rise to the possibility of form, shape, and everything imaginable. We would appear to be trapped, therefore, in our limited perceptual mechanisms.
15. Yet even this inescapable trap is of our own devising. The fact that human awareness has created a story and then bought into it, forgetting that we are its creators, cannot destroy one true thing: We are aware of being aware.
16. The fact that we are aware can never be eradicated, but we can put it to new uses that would abolish the old uses.
17. The most important of these new uses is to wake up from the illusion.
18. Experience is infinitely malleable, infinitely creative. Seeing that this is true, we wake up from a host of limiting beliefs, prejudices, and false assumptions.
19. Awareness is transcendent, existing in an inconceivable domain beyond space, time, matter, and energy. Yet this domain is the source of everything. When we wake up to this fact, we no longer give privileged positions to things that don’t deserve them. Ripe for demotion are death, fear, materialism, the brain-as-mind, and other outworn aspects of a story based entirely on Maya.
20. If our source is unbounded awareness, we should participate in everyday life on the basis of this one true thing, the only truth that deserves a capital T. To be grounded in formless being is to know reality — this is both awakening and freedom.
As you see when you go deeply into it, this argument for consciousness is irrefutable, as much as physicalists deny it. They grow angry in the face of serious challenges to the assumption that the physical world “out there” defines reality.
But behind the concerted force of science, received opinion, ad hominem attacks, and sheer ignorance, there is still the unquenchable need to know what is real. Only by accessing reality will we humans know who we are and why we are here. The next time you see a single red rose, take a closer look. It contains a mystery powerful enough to topple the universe.
DEEPAK CHOPRA, MD, FACP, FRCP, is a Consciousness Explorer and a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. Chopra is the co-founder of DeepakChopra.ai, his AI twin and well-being advisor. He also co-founded Cyberhuman, a transformative suite of personalized health and well-being solutions. Chopra is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego, and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is also an Honorary Fellow in Medicine at the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow. He is the author of over 95 books, translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers.
For the last thirty years, Chopra has been at the forefront of the meditation revolution. His mission is to create a more balanced, peaceful, joyful, and healthier world. Through his teachings, he guides individuals to embrace their inherent strength, wisdom, and potential for personal and societal transformation.
In his latest book, “Digital Dharma” (Harmony/Rodale), Chopra navigates the balance between technology and expanded awareness, explaining that while AI cannot duplicate human intelligence, it can vastly enhance personal and spiritual growth. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of their top 100 most influential people.” www.deepakchopra.com.
