Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul

Dear Readers and Friends,

In our quest to grow and evolve, we all run into obstacles. We meet resistance. Change proves stubborn and at times impossible. Anything that I can do to overcome these obstacles is a contribution I never wish to pass up.

In my new book I address the most difficult obstacle of all: the body.

The human body can be a source of the miraculous. The very minute I write this message to you, someone in a laboratory somewhere is breaking through old concepts about the body, discovering that what was once a machine made of flesh and bones is actually a living process, a river without boundaries. Yet you and I find ourselves with bodies that wear out, age, grow sick, and disappoint our highest aspirations for freedom and creativity.

Clearly, the body needs to be reinvented. That's the main theme of my new book, Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul. I throw out every fixed belief about what the body can and cannot do. In their place, I offer five breakthrough ideas that can completely alter how you see your body and what you do with it.

• Breakthrough #1 -- Your Physical Body Is an Illusion


• Breakthrough #2 -- Your Real Body Is Energy


• Breakthrough #3 -- Awareness Has Magic


• Breakthrough #4 -- You Can Improve Your Genes


• Breakthrough #5 -- Time Isn't Your enemy

Each of these breakthroughs overturns an outmoded belief that turns into a physical limitation. If you think of your body as a physical object, you will cooperate with aging, because what is aging but a physical object wearing out? If you believe that time is your enemy, aging has gained another ally. If you accept that your genes are fixed, they take away your freedom to change.

What these five breakthroughs have in common is this: you can change your body through consciousness, because despite its physical appearance, your body is the product of consciousness to begin with. There is no difference between a thought and a molecule in the brain. Each intention sends signals to every cell in the body, causing the cell to change. Therefore, the most natural way to achieve change is through the power of intention.

The second half of the book's title, Resurrecting the Soul, extends the power of consciousness far beyond the physical. The soul is your spiritual body. It brings nourishment to every cell as surely as nutrients are brought by the blood. Most people believe they have a soul, but they rarely if ever feel connected to it. When you reconnect, a kind of resurrection occurs: you discover that the closer you live to your soul, the better for your body.

Health, anti-aging, a strong sense of self, centeredness, spontaneous right action, the increase of love and compassion -- these are all united at the deepest level of consciousness. Every cell is aware of the state of your soul, and vice versa. One consciousness, constantly moving and evolving, is who you really are.

This conclusion is the most important one I've arrived at after thirty years of teaching people how to unite body, mind, and soul. Union cannot be achieved one piece at a time. Even though most people attack their problems one at a time and have mixed priorities in their lives, the truth is that wholeness is wholeness. People don't feel whole because they have excluded their bodies from the spiritual journey, judging the body to be inferior, defective, ugly, and devoid of intelligence. At the other end of the scale, they have sent the soul into a never-never region above and beyond this world.

So as you reinvent your body, which means accepting it as part of your whole consciousness, the soul must also be brought back into partnership with it. Five soul breakthroughs are needed:

• Breakthrough #6 -- There's an Easier Way to Live


• Breakthrough #7 -- Love Awakens the Soul


• Breakthrough #8 -- Be as Boundless as Your Soul


• Breakthrough #9 -- The Fruit of Surrender Is Grace


• Breakthrough #10 -- The Universe Evolves through You

When you absorb these ten ideas, and follow the practical exercises attached to each, you will turn the process of life in a new direction. Instead of being blocked by obstacles, areas of freedom open up where you never imagined them. I speak personally, because the seed of this book dates back to my first days in medical school. When I used a scalpel to slice beyond the barrier of the skin, I gained scientific knowledge about the body, but at the same time I sacrificed the body's mystery and holiness.

We need to have both. The reason you can reinvent the body rests upon solid new evidence about the brain, genes, and lifestyle changes. Yet those are the windows through which a much greater truth can be seen, which is this. When the flow of life encompasses mind, body, and soul, a person has found the easiest way to live. We must put out of our heads that unity is an exotic, faraway goal reached only by the spiritually gifted.

When you delve into Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul, your allegiance will shift to wholeness. You won't be fixated on your body, your mind, or your spiritual path. The three will merge, as they must in order to be whole. The reunion is the most joyous experience anyone can have, and happily for all of us, it's also the most natural.

deepakchopra.com

 

Follow Deepak Chopra on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Deepak_Chopra

Comments

[LifeChangeStartsNow]

Deepak Chopra, thank you for sharing this and saying it so very clearly. it is so easily understood too. It blows my mind to see what I've known for so long but most could never grasp where I was coming from. It confirms that I'm truly on the right path. Wonderful!

Cheers.

[David M]

If you're a fan of Deepak Chopra, you might want to check out his new iPhone app (http://www.DeepakChopraMobile.com); it’s a first of its kind iPhone application implementing a thorough program to removing stress from daily life.

[AbrahamSadegh]

I was floating in space asking the computer HAL of the “2001: A Space Odyssey” questions about complexity of the human body. I asked for one to be projected in front of me and enlarged and moved away so that I could see the whole body down to the atoms….

Wow! Each of us, a Universe!

Now, according to an engineering site at Washington University, the number of atoms in an ordinary cell is about 100 trillion which is about the same as the number of cells in the human body.

Also based on final project for “MIT Class MAS 862 (1998) by Vadim Gerasimov corrected and updated in 2000-2006”:

“ … Each cell of the human body is an elaborate bio-chemical computer. It has its own power management and information processing structures. It communicates with its neighbors and the environment ... Most cells have a complete copy of the genetic information and theoretically are capable of recreating the whole human body.

“The magnitude of information processing activity inside the human body is amazing. The cell reproduction processes require terabytes of chromosome DNA information to be copied every second within the body. Besides, the protein formation and other functions in cells can be several orders of magnitude more informatio­n-intensiv­e.

“Power consumption of a single cell corresponds to about 10 million chemical reactions per second.”

Mind boggling!

By the way, today a car bomb in Lahor killed 39 people.

[khanti]

One question, if you practice the ten points does it mean you are not subjected to old age, sickness and death? Or suffer from the changing process that goes with it?

[HeevenSteven]

Deepak, this is all metaphorical, right?

[mydwyf]

Well, the minute there is no longer a roof over your head, or no food to eat, or you have an abscessed tooth, or a family member runs a fever of 105, or . . . or . . . yes, mostly metaphorical.

[JohnFromCensornati]

No, seriously. Every cell is aware of the state of your soul.

[HeevenSteven]

That's what I was afraid of.

[khanti]

To all HuffPo Hindu readers. Happy Deepavali. A time when good triumphs over evil. Let there be light!

[SILVANUS]

All good advice, sir.

Hard work to avoid the cultural hypnosis out there that is SO against this way of being and perceiving, but... who said it would be easy?

Some are getting it, slowly, but most folks only seem to learn through 'crisis', and the greed of the insurance-­med-pharma complex is happily re-playing out the crucifixion with them until they, out of desperation, pick up a different kaleidoscope.

[zizyphus]

Philosophy du jour:

I agree that we are all energy, but I think we are a hologram made by some nerdy geek in an advanced universe, and they are playing us like a virtual reality game. Or a science experiment gone badly awry...

Well, why not, it is as likely as all the theories and religions...

[mydwyf]

It is very possible that what we think of as the 'universe' is really a very sophisticated hyperdimensional planetarium . . .

For some reason (synchronicity ? resonance? ) I live in an area which is very highly charged in the sense of plasma energy. Over time it has been made apparent that, if I pay attention, the subjective,
interactive nature of 'reality' is extraordinary and there is no such thing as 'objective' reality.

The laboratory is not the place to discover 'new concepts about the body'.
What does it for me is listening to orthodox Russian church music of the 16th & 17th centuries.
That music definitely does speak directly to my dna. Nothing but male and female human voices, in the most amazing harmonic modulations.

This is an interesting essay but also a shameless pitch for a book, and if I was an experiencer of
a chronic and debilitating physical or mental syndrome which no amount of 'enlightenment' seems likely to relieve, it might really be offputting to me. Perhaps a paragraph about this book's relevance to those in such situations might be in order.

[ScribblerG]

Which is to say it's just another fantasy.

[drricklippin]

Admist all the obstruse , dense and confusing legal and legislative language of US health care reform comes a needed dose of universal wisdom for the ages for improved health for all of us from Deepak Chopra.

Ahhhh- I can breathe again.

Good Rx here!

Thanks,

Dr. Rick Lippin
Southampton,Pa