TCF 12.10.23 | Should We Worry about the Afterlife?

As we move forward in our quest for expanded consciousness and well-being, it's imperative we reflect upon the diversity and depth of topics that have recently graced our discussions. This week, we are embracing a multitude of perspectives from our recent gatherings and interviews.

We began with a contemplation on the afterlife, an area that Dr. Deepak Chopra has explored, questioning the widely-held assumption that death is the final frontier. This exploration serves as a reminder that much of our existence and experience remains a profound mystery.

In the ‘The Future of Psychedelics’, we've also delved into the potential of psychedelic medicine through a series of fireside chats. These conversations brought together experts and visionaries to discuss the therapeutic applications, economic prospects, and the blend of ancient wisdom and modern science that psychedelics represent. We are learning from indigenous cultures, considering the ethical implications of this knowledge, and understanding the media's influence on public perception. We are grateful to our partner Cybin for their ongoing support to enable us to champion the public education and awareness of Psychedelics.

I had the privilege to discuss AI and Web3 as transformative forces in wellbeing, ?with Deepak Chopra and Matt Medved at ArtBasel - Miami Gateway 2023. I also had the opportunity to dive into Quantum Body at the Alpaca VC WellTech event in Miami.

In a similar vein of holistic health, Dr. Suhas Kshirsagar shared insights on Ayurveda and its principles for this week's Peak Living Series, emphasizing a lifestyle that nurtures the body, mind, and spirit.

We are also proud to announce that the 'Love Is Tolerance' movement has recognized the efforts of Deepak Chopra MD and the Chopra Foundation with their “Peace Is the Way” award, reinforcing our commitment to peace and tolerance.

In the spirit of support and collaboration, we highlight the enchanting offerings of Snow Raven. We encourage participation at her upcoming concert on Dec. 16th in NYC. Additionally, we extend our support to 'The American Sikh' team, as they present a special screening of their animated short on December 14th in NYC, a story that resonates with our values of diversity and acceptance.

As we continue to navigate these rich and diverse landscapes of knowledge and experience, I invite you all to stay engaged, curious, and open-hearted. Together, we are on a transformative journey that promises to redefine health, healing, and human potential.

Poonacha Machaiah - CEO

The Chopra Foundation

www.choprafoundation.org

Should We Worry about the Afterlife?

By Deepak Chopra, MD, FACP, FRCP

I’ve noticed a rise in the number of people who say they take it for granted that there is no afterlife. As heavens and hells fade from secular society, the scientific worldview offers no decisive proof about what happens when the physical body dies. That should make the afterlife an open question, like speculating about whether a plant orbiting around a distant star might have life on it. But somehow the absence of proof has made countless people decide that death is final.

As sticky and complicated as this issue is, it can be broken down into three perspectives that in themselves are simple. The perspective of a devout believer supports life after death; the skeptical perspective denies it; the undecideds stand in the middle. The fundamental issue is whether the afterlife can be transformed into a viable question.

I believe it can, once we return to basics, including the most boring basic, which is to clearly define our terms. That sounds boring, but as it turns out, defining our terms answers the question.

The most basic term in this case is consciousness, because when arguing over the possibility of an afterlife, much confusion is caused by asking the wrong questions. If you don’t specify what consciousness is, you wind up worrying about the survival of the soul, or of “me,” the individual ego-personality. And if those pitfalls are avoided, Eastern traditions are filled with equally misleading notions of Jiva, Atman, and Brahman, or of Nirvana and Satori.

If two people agree on their definition of consciousness, they will agree on the existence or non-existence of an afterlife. For a skeptic whose core belief is that all things can be explained through materialism (data, experiments, measurements, etc.), there is no doubt that the afterlife is spurious — not because it actually is, but because a skeptic’s worldview forbids it to exist. By the same token, a devout believer holds fast to a worldview where the non-existence of a personal God is impermissible, even unthinkable, and therefore the afterlife acquires its reality by association with the deity.

Seeing this rigidity on both sides, is there a definition of consciousness completely detached from all belief systems, which means the absence of bias, predisposition, received wisdom, rumor, myth, group pressure, wishful thinking, fear, and mental figments of every sort? I believe so.

Every reasonable person, I think, will accept that consciousness, as experienced by humans, is the awareness of two things: that we exist and that we experience. By extension, a reality that cannot be experienced is moot. By this measure, UFOs, angels, the afterlife, and the quantum vacuum exist on the same playing field. They are suppositions and inferences.

If we toss out suppositions and inferences, what can we truthfully say about consciousness? By this I mean what can we say that no reasonable person will disagree with? Here we run into a complicated situation because certain aspects of consciousness require extended discussion and a back-and-forth between people of good will. Such a setup is rare, unfortunately, but at least I can relate a few things that I’ve been able to convince people of over the years.

1. There is only one consciousness. To subdivide it makes no sense. This point is lifted almost verbatim from Erwin Schr?dinger, the eminent quantum pioneer. Philosophically, the “one consciousness” position is common to monistic schools, because they repudiate any true difference, ontologically, between the one and the many. Yet when dealing with everyday people, it’s obvious that we all cling fervently to being individuals, outfitted with “my” family, house, body, mind, and soul. To crack this allegiance requires arguments like the following:

· When you get wet, do you call it “my” wet? Some things happen to us personally but turn out to have a general existence.

· If you sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” as you walk down the street, did the song walk down the street with you?

· If you imagine your mother’s face, where is that mental image located? The brain has no pictures in it, and no light. When you imagine your mother’s face, you don’t consult a directory of facial characteristics the way computer recognition software does — you simply call up what you wish to see.

· Where is your self located? There is no neurological evidence of a region of the brain that contains the self, and even if researchers claimed such a region existed, it would have to contain everything attached to you as a self, including your life history.

2. Assuming that the discussion can crack open the presumption of isolated, local consciousness — there are many ways to get at this, not just the few questions listed above — the second point is that this “one consciousness” cannot be located. It is everywhere, all at once. This point sounds like a hard sell, as it would be if everyone held an advanced degree in philosophy, I imagine. But in everyday life, the argument is fairly easily based on physics.

— Cosmologists and quantum physicists agree that spacetime originated in a domain (referred to as the zero point, quantum vacuum state, or the realm of pure mathematics) that isn’t in time and space.

— The entire universe, as well as individual subatomic particles, emerged from this pre-created state, which has no qualities we would recognize such as linear time, dimensionality, solidity, energy, etc.

- At the very least, all creation stories, scientific or not, converge on the creation of something out of nothing. Beyond our experience of reality in spacetime, there is a field of infinite potential and unbounded possibilities.

- As the reality of space, time, matter, and energy appeared and continues to appear, the existence of consciousness must be accounted for. There are only two viable possibilities that are taken seriously. The “matter first” position holds that the mind has its origins in matter and energy (to which some theorists add information). The “mind first” position holds that consciousness is the source of everything, including matter and energy.

3. If there are only these two positions, how do we decide between them? The difficulty is that being monistic, the two are incompatible and, more critically, totally self-consistent. It isn’t possible to step outside the framework of “mind first” or “matter first” to gather evidence. All the evidence lies within the worldview that produced it. Even if other, as yet unknown, kinds of evidence emerged — such as the current, quite baffling existence of so-called dark matter and dark energy, which don’t follow the rules of visible matter and energy — it would be absorbed into pre-existing stories that we live by.

In deciding between “mind first” and “matter first,” the crux is a single question. Is it more probable that matter somehow learned to think or that the mind can create matter? It seems astonishing to me that more than 90% of scientists are so conditioned to reduce every issue to matter and energy, that they accept without investigation the assumption that the sugar in a sugar cube, once ingested, can travel past the blood-brain barrier and suddenly think, feel, wish dream, and do science. No one has remotely come close to showing the point in evolutionary history where ordinary molecules acquired consciousness. Therefore, the very notion that the brain is a privileged object, the only “thing” in creation that has consciousness, is untenable. The brain is simply an ordinary object composed of ordinary atoms and molecules. It didn’t become consciousness through the random combination of complex organic chemicals.

The contrary position, that consciousness pre-exists the physical world, has some simple evidence on its side. The simplest, of course, is that the impossibility of the “matter first” position leaves only one other viewpoint that can reasonably be true. But to most people, such an argument feels like sleight of hand. Therefore, we can point to the human brain, where every sensation, image, feeling, and thought pushes brain chemicals around, redirects them to various parts of the body, causes vital signs to change either slowly or abruptly, and actually produces some chemicals, such as neurotransmitters, out of nothing.

The creation of something out of nothing has been lurking in the background as the ultimate question, yet concerning everyday experience, the mystery becomes both personal and self-evident. If someone whispers, “I love you” in your ear, the mind-body system will display hundreds of changes dissimilar to what occurs if the whispered words are “I have a gun pointed at your heart.” The deciding factor isn’t material in the slightest; it consists of mental activity, the continual production of thoughts, words, meaning, purpose, direction, intention, and so on.

It is far from impossible to convince reasonable people that these points are true, and they stem from defining consciousness in the most basic, intuitively validated way. As to the specific issue of an afterlife, consider what lies on the side of its existence:

* Consciousness, being nonlocal, is not subject to birth and death

* Even in physicalist terms, there must be a pre-created state beyond time and space. Birth and death, being aspects of linear time, are not present there.

* An argument can be mounted that certain abstract experiences, such as mathematics and information, have an indestructible aspect, again immune to birth and death.

* Body, mind, and the world “out there” cannot be divorced from conscious experience. The only reasonable location for all of them is in consciousness itself.

* If all of the above are true, then nothing exists except as a modified state of consciousness. Some of these states we identify as matter and energy, but this is simply a habit of mind built up for cultural reasons. There have been societies where “mind first” was just as self-evident as “matter first” is to us.

Having laid out, in truncated form, the argument for consciousness as the basis of reality, not everyone may be willing to follow the clues that lead to an afterlife. But that isn’t as important as realizing that we have tended to ask the wrong questions. One can devote a book to untangling the various possibilities for consciousness to persist after the end of the body (I wrote one, Life After Death). In the end, however, the stubborn way that old stories cling to us, and we to them, muddies the issue and opens the way for vehement partisans who refuse to see that they are flogging second-hand opinions.

Until we all are willing to think fresh thoughts about a worn-out question, consciousness will remain constricted. If consciousness begins to expand on an individual basis, there is hope for clarity. More importantly, we can begin to bring centuries of baseless fear and superstition to an end. I’d suggest that ending the superstition of materialism would be a good start.

The secret to a longer life – according to the A-list’s ‘spiritual guru’ Deepak Chopra

By Mick Brown | The Telegraph | December 8, 2023

So, I ask Deepak Chopra, what are the two most interesting things he has seen or learnt over the past 24 hours?

Chopra pauses. We are sitting in a room of his office space in downtown Manhattan. Plastic swivel chairs, bare walls, a large screen for conference calls.

‘This morning...’ He thinks about this. This morning he has risen at Ive, as he always does, and done two hours of yoga and an hour of meditation. No breakfast. Chopra eats only one meal a day – a late lunch or an early supper. Link to full article: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/health-fitness/wellbeing/stress/deepak-chopra-author-interview/

Exploring Well-being, AI, and Web3 with Deepak Chopra

Erika Lee, Dec 7, 2023

In the first panel of the day, Deepak Chopra and Poonacha Machaiah, CEO of the Chopra Foundation, joined by moderator Matt Medved, shared their perspective on various crucial topics, shedding light on how AI and Web3 can help with their vision for a better world.

Chopra and Macahiah talk about the emergence of AI and how it’s been able to disrupt and improve the healthcare industry. While speaking about the strengths of AI, Medved asks the panelists about their thoughts on the downsides of AI.

“There are downsides to everything. When we discovered fire, there were downsides,” Chopra said. “When there’s a new technology, it’s a free-for-all all. That’s kind of scary.”

Machaiah adds to this by saying, “What’s going to happen is going to happen.” However, that’s why he says he emphasizes the importance of intention and the potential for love to become the driving force behind technology. According to him, love can serve as the operating system that guides technological advancements. <article>

??Unveiling a musical odyssey like no other! “HOME: Arctic Siberian Shamanic Live Concert” featuring the internationally acclaimed indigenous artist SNOW RAVEN and the gifted MISHA MISHENKO. Experience the magic, wisdom, and power of SNOW RAVEN’s ancestors brought to life through her profound connection to Sakha (Yakutia).

Thank you SNOW RAVEN, for sharing your magic with the Chopra Foundation. Support her event in NYC, December 16th 7:30PM (ST PAUL & ST ANDREW METHODIST CHURCH):

Tickets at: https://tickets.brightstarevents.com/tickets/snowravennyc

Wellbeing & Longevity

Yoga and Your Goals: Part I - By Ryan Castle

When we hear someone mention they practice yoga, our culture often assumes a stereotyped and simplistic idea of a room filled with people gently stretching. However, yoga is an ancient art form blending physical postures, breathing exercises, and meditation, and over the centuries has branched into many styles. Each has its unique health benefits, spiritual components, and methods. There is a great spectrum of different yoga types and each can be tailored to your health and wellness goals. Today we will be discussing some of the more well-known practices, though you should know this is just scratching the surface of a rich, complex world.<article>