Excerpt | An Interview with Deepak Chopra: You Are the Universe
by Claudia Welss and Deepak Chopra
Welss: Would you please address what visionary quantum pioneer Wolfgang Pauli meant when he said, “The science of the future reality will neither be psychic nor physical, but somehow both and somehow neither.” And, if it fits with your response, please say more about what you mean when you say in the book that the universe is actually a mirror of the human nervous system.
Chopra: I’m saying that as a preliminary to something much more important. We know that the universe that we experience as human beings somehow has something to do with that which we call the human brain. We’re not experiencing the universe in the way, say, a bat would. A bat would experience the universe as the echo of ultrasound. A chameleon’s eyeballs swivel on two different axes; we can’t even remotely imagine what the universe would look like to a chameleon. A honeybee returns to its hive after visiting a flowering grove and does what is called a waggle dance to communicate where the other bees can go for honey. What we call perceptual reality is a species-specific phenomenon; there is no such thing as the look of the world. It depends on who’s looking and what nervous system they are using to do that looking.
Let’s examine that because we do not know how the brain actually produces the experience. When you’re looking at an object, how does the brain take photons that have no dimensionality or color and are all that are coming towards you and you have the experience of a three-dimensional world in space and time, with color and fragrance and texture and sound? We don’t know that. While we can say that our brain correlates with that experience, correlation does not necessarily mean causation. But we do know that a human brain produces what we call the human universe.
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About the Authors
Deepak Chopra, MD, FACP, Founder of The Chopra Foundation and the Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in mind-body medicine and personal transformation. He has authored more than 80 books. The World Post and The Huffington Post global Internet survey ranked him the #17 most influential thinker in the world and #1 in Medicine Fitness. Time magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.”www.deepakchopra.com, www.choprafoundation.org
Claudia Welss is the board chair of the Institute of NoeticSciences and works at the nexus of consciousness, technology, human-earth energetics, and large-scale social change with the Global Coherence Initiative, Invest In Yourself at Nexus Global, and others. Claudia was previously the director of executive programs at the University of California Berkeley Haas School of Business, where she pioneered a social and environmental responsibility curriculum for corporations.
But you’re just speaking of the brain & our photon’s exchanging information in a awoken state. What about the dream state? Isn’t the Universe Dreaming itself? And, isn’t the brain ubiquitous in crossing over that thin veil between awoken and dreaming? And, how does the nervous system become secular in experiencing one set of optic nerves translating what we see in front of us when string theory theorizes multiple dimensions happening at the same time and our consciousness is non-local?
Dehanna, This is just an excerpt. You will need to read the whole article – even the whole book to understand what Deepak is saying. Thanks for taking the time to comment. Nancy Roof