I was reminded recently that we live in a Catch-22 Universe. What makes it a Catch-22 is that no one is qualified to penetrate the mystery of the cosmos without skill in advanced mathematics, and yet those who have this skill are so tied to numbers that they see reality...

Most people have never heard the phrase "the human universe," so it got a major boost from British physicist Brian Cox. A popular science presenter in the UK and physics professor at the University of Manchester, Cox called his latest BBC series by that name. (The amplified text is available...

ISIS and its atrocious acts have thrown the issue of evil into high relief. Once more we are forced to confront a horrifying aspect of human nature and to ask ourselves what can be done about it.  This post isn't about U.S. policy against ISIS -- that's the business of...

By Deepak Chopra, MD, Menas Kafatos, PhD, Bernardo Kastrup, PhD, Rudolph Tanzi, PhD

Science concerns itself with reality, in the form of "real particles", "real organisms", and the "real universe". The tacit assumption is that science can answer the question of reality itself. If this wasn't the case, science...

By Deepak Chopra, MD, Rudolph E. Tanzi, PhD

Genetics may be on the verge of solving a very complex question in a revolutionary but quite simple way. The question is, What does it take to be happy? The question never goes away. It hangs over our heads every day. The...

Deepak Chopra, M.D., FACP, Shamini Jain, Ph.D, David Muehsam, Ph.D., Richard Hammerschlag, Ph.D., John Ives, Ph.D., Wayne Jonas, M.D., Cassandra Vieten, Ph.D., Daniel Vicario, M.D; Rauni Pritten King, RN, MIH, CHTPI, & Erminia Guarneri, M.D., FACC

We live in an age of unparalleled technological and scientific progress, juxtaposed with...

By Deepak Chopra, MD, Menas Kafatos, PhD, Bernardo Kastrup, PhD, Rudolph E. Tanzi, PhD

Science often makes strides by contradicting what we take for granted, and the biggest thing everyone takes for granted is the physical world.  Our senses wrap themselves around tangible objects so naturally that it's difficult...

By Deepak Chopra, MD, Menas Kafatos, PhD, Bernardo Kastrup, PhD

In a recent blog posting, physicist Lawrence Krauss defended the notion that the physical universe is objectively real. To think otherwise, he says, is nonsensical. "Deepak Chopra, for example, keeps implying that quantum mechanics means that objective...

For most people, enlightenment, if it exists at all, remains a distant prospect that they never think of. It belongs to other people in other countries, with no relevance to the here and now. In the past few postings I've tried to dispel this notion, arguing that enlightenment is actually...

Now that yoga and meditation have become everyday experiences rather than exotic practices reserved for a sliver of the population with an interest in the East, the same needs to happen with enlightenment. It remains in the old pigeon-hole that yoga and meditation have escaped. In all the yoga classes...

In the last two posts I've argued that there should be a new norm in how we view the mind, presenting the possibility that enlightenment is our natural state. Higher consciousness has become an exotic state reserved for saints, sages, and swamis, haloed in religious terminology. But behind the aura...

For centuries in the West there was no discussion about the mind without bringing in God; higher states of consciousness were considered blessed or miraculous. This wasn't so in the East, where higher states were discussed on the basis of experience. Someone who claimed to be in such a higher...

"Enlightenment" is a word that has gotten so entangled with vague confusion that many people have given up on it. I don't mean the classic seeker who hungers for God, Nirvana, or higher states of consciousness. There isn't an accepted definition of enlightenment that allows for a general discussion where...

All of us, I feel fairly certain, believe that forgiveness is a positive quality. But the fact that religion has been the traditional basis for finding forgiveness has made it seem quite often that there's something saintly, or at the very least unusually gentle, compassionate, and selfless in those who...

In a society that places a high value on competition and winning, everyone wants to succeed. It becomes difficult to discuss failure, which somehow translates into personal weakness, lack, or vulnerability. I'd like to reframe the whole relationship between success and failure so that both become part of a single...

Fear is a negative emotion unless you are facing an actual threat and need to fight or flee. The usefulness of fear is minimal in daily life, particularly in the form of anxiety. Stressful events can produce short-term anxiety in almost everyone, which disappears after the event. But for an estimated...

Paul J. Mills, Tiffany Barsotti, Meredith A. Pung, Kathleen L. Wilson,
Laura Redwine, and Deepak Chopra

Gratitude, along with love, compassion, empathy, joy, forgiveness, and self-knowledge, is a vital attribute of our wellbeing. While there are many definitions of gratitude, at its foundation, gratitude is a healing, life-affirming, and...

By Deepak Chopra, MD, and Menas Kafatos, PhD

The night sky that you can view from your back yard is roughly the same, given a few changes in the positions of stars, as the night sky Galileo turned his telescope on to. But visual similarity is misleading. There have been...

When they become parents, many people wonder how to impart spiritual values to their children. The traditional model of sending them to Sunday school is one alternative; another is to draw the entire family into the personal spirituality of the parents, as more people turn away from organized religion to...

By Deepak Chopra, MD, and Menas Kafatos, PhD

For a very long time, if you wanted to know if something is real or not, the go-to people have been scientists. The rise of rationality over superstition is considered the single greatest achievement of the past three or four centuries....