Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul Read online

  Also by Deepak Chopra

  Creating Health

  Return of the Rishi

  Quantum Healing

  Perfect Health

  Unconditional Life

  Ageless Body, Timeless Mind

  Journey into Healing

  Creating Affluence

  Perfect Weight

  Restful Sleep

  The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success

  The Return of Merlin

  Boundless Energy

  Perfect Digestion

  The Way of the Wizard

  Overcoming Addictions

  Raid on the Inarticulate

  The Path to Love

  The Seven Spiritual Laws for Parents

  The Love Poems of Rumi (edited by Deepak Chopra; translated by Deepak Chopra and Fereydoun Kia)

  Healing the Heart

  Everyday Immortality

  The Lords of the Light

  On the Shores of Eternity

  How to Know God

  The Soul in Love

  The Chopra Center Herbal Handbook (with coauthor David Simon)

  Grow Younger, Live Longer (with coauthor David Simon)

  The Deeper Wound

  The Chopra Center Cookbook (coauthored by David Simon and Leanne Backer)

  The Angel Is Near

  The Daughters of Joy

  Golf for Enlightenment

  Soulmate

  The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire

  Peace Is the Way

  The Book of Secrets

  Fire in the Heart

  The Seven Spiritual Laws of Yoga (with coauthor David Simon)

  Magical Beginnings, Enchanted Lives (coauthored by David Simon and Vicki Abrams)

  Life After Death

  Buddha

  The Essential How to Know God

  The Essential Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire

  The Essential Ageless Body, Timeless Mind

  The Third Jesus

  Jesus

  To my beloved grandchildren,

  Tara, Leela, and Krishan

  Contents

  Introduction: The Forgotten Miracle

  REINVENTING YOUR BODY

  Breakthrough #1: Your Physical Body Is a Fiction

  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

  RESURRECTING YOUR SOUL

  Breakthrough #1: There’s an Easier Way to Live

  Breakthrough #2: Love Awakens the Soul

  Breakthrough #3: Be as Boundless as Your Soul

  Breakthrough #4: The Fruit of Surrender Is Grace

  Breakthrough #5: The Universe Evolves Through You

  10 STEPS TO WHOLENESS

  Conclusion: “Who Made Me?”

  Acknowledgments

  INTRODUCTION:

  THE FORGOTTEN MIRACLE

  In my first semester in medical school, I walked into a stifling dissection room and faced a body lying under a sheet. Pulling back that sheet was shocking—and definitely exciting as well. I took my scalpel and cut a fine line down the skin over the breastbone. The mystery of the human body was about to reveal itself.

  At that moment I also stripped the body of its sacred nature. I crossed a line that is nearly impossible to recross ever gain. Thanks to science, a huge amount of factual knowledge has been gained, but at the same time a wealth of spiritual wisdom has been lost.

  Why can’t we have both?

  It would take a leap of creative thinking, a breakthrough. I’m calling this breakthrough the reinvention of the body. You may not realize it, but your body is an invention to begin with. Pick up any medical journal, and you come away with a host of concepts that are purely man-made. One day I sat down and listed the articles of faith I was taught in medical school. It came to a long list of dubious propositions, as follows:

  The body is a machine assembled from moving parts, and like all machines it wears out over time.

  The body is at constant risk for contamination and disease; a hostile environment teems with invading germs and viruses waiting to overwhelm the body’s immune defenses.

  Cells and organs are separate from each other and should be studied separately.

  Random chemical reactions determine everything that happens in the body.

  The brain creates the mind through a storm of electrical impulses combined with biochemical responses that can be manipulated to alter the mind.

  Memories are stored in brain cells, even though no one has ever discovered how or where this occurs.

  Nothing metaphysical is real; reality comes down to atoms and molecules.

  Genes determine our behavior; like microchips, they are programmed to tell the body what to do.

  Everything about the body evolved as a matter of survival, the ultimate goal being to find a mate and reproduce.

  I used to find this list very convincing. The bodies that I examined and treated in my medical practice conformed to it. Patients came to me with parts that were wearing out. I could pare their symptoms down to treatable problems. I prescribed antibiotics to fend off invading bacteria, and so on. And yet every one of these people lived lives that had nothing to do with machines breaking down and needing repair. These lives were full of meaning and hope, emotions and aspirations, love and suffering. Machines don’t lead such lives. Neither do collections of organs. Before long I began to see that the body as seen through the lens of science was inadequate and artificial.

  Without a doubt, the body needs reinventing. To have a meaningful life, you have to use your body—you can’t experience anything without one—and so your body should be meaningful, too. What would give your body its highest meaning, purpose, intelligence, and creativity? Only the sacred side of our nature. This led me to the phrase “resurrecting the soul.” I am hesitant to use religious terms because they are loaded with emotional baggage, but soul is unavoidable. Ninety percent of people believe they have a soul, and that it gives their lives ultimate meaning. The soul is divine; it connects us to God. Insofar as life contains love, truth, and beauty, we look to our soul as the source of those qualities; it’s no accident that a perfect love is called a soul mate.

  There is constant feedback between the soul and the body. We invented the separation between the two, and then came to believe that separation was real.

  You may object that you’ve never felt ecstatic or sensed the presence of God. This simply reflects our narrow conception of the soul, confining it to religion. If you look into the wisdom traditions of every culture, you find that the soul has other meanings. It is the source of life, the spark that animates dead matter. It creates the mind and emotions. In other words, the soul is the very foundation of experience. It serves as the channel for creation as it unfolds in every second. What makes these lofty ideas important is that everything the soul does is translated into a process in the body. You literally cannot have a body without the soul. This is the forgotten miracle. Each of us is a soul made flesh.

  I want to prove to you that your body needs reinventing and that you have the power to accomplish that. Every generation has tinkered with the body, strange as that sounds. During the pre-scientific age, the body was deeply distrusted, and it was provided with squalid sanitation, wretched food, and barely enough protection from the elements to survive. Thus it became natural to expect a short, nasty life filled with pain and disease.

  So that’s exactly what the body produced. People lived thirty years on average, and were scarred for life by childhood illnesses. You and I benefited enormously when this life
view became outdated. As we began to expect more from our bodies, we stopped mistreating them. Now your body is ready for the next breakthrough, which will reconnect it with meaning, with the deeper values of the soul. There is no reason to deprive your body of love, beauty, creativity, and inspiration. You are intended to experience ecstasy just as much as any saint, and when you do, your cells will join in.

  Life is meant to be a complete experience. People keep struggling with problems both physical and mental, never suspecting the root cause: that the bond between body and soul has been severed. I wrote this book in the hope of restoring that bond. I’m as eager and optimistic as the first day I used my scalpel to uncover the mysteries waiting under the skin, only now my optimism extends to the spirit as well. The world needs healing. To the extent that you wake up your soul, humankind is waking up the world’s soul. It may yet happen that a wave of healing will sweep over us, a small wave at first, but one that could swell beyond all expectations in a single generation.

  REINVENTING

  YOUR BODY

  FROM BREAKDOWN TO

  BREAKTHROUGH

  For you and me, the body poses problems that will only grow worse. As children we loved our bodies and rarely thought about them. As we grew older, though, we soon fell out of love, and with good reason. Billions of dollars are spent to cure the body of its many ills and miseries. Billions more are thrown down the drain for cosmetics, whose purpose is to fool us into thinking we look better than we do. To be blunt, the human body is unsatisfactory and has been for a long time. It can’t be trusted, since sickness often strikes without warning. It deteriorates over time and eventually dies. Let’s attack this problem seriously. Instead of making do with the physical form you were given at birth, why not look for a breakthrough, a completely new way of approaching the body?

  Breakthroughs occur when you start thinking about a problem in a fresh new way. The biggest breakthroughs occur when you start thinking in an unbounded way. Take your eyes away from what you see in the mirror. If you came from Mars and have never seen how the body ages and declines over time, you might believe it would work in just the opposite way. From a biological point of view, there’s no reason why the body should be flawed. So start there. Having erased every outworn assumption from your mind, you are now free to entertain some breakthrough ideas that totally change the situation:

  Your body is boundless. It is channeling the energy, creativity, and intelligence of the entire universe.

  At this moment, the universe is listening through your ears, seeing through your eyes, experiencing through your brain.

  Your purpose for being here is to allow the universe to evolve.

  None of this is outlandish. The human body is already the universe’s most advanced laboratory experiment. You and I are at the cutting edge of life. Our best chance for survival is to embrace that fact. Rapid evolution, faster than that for any other life-form on the planet, gave us our present state of ever-increasing health, longer life-span, exploding creativity, and a vision of possibilities that science advances faster and faster. Our physical evolution ceased around 200,000 years ago. You don’t possess liver, lungs, heart, or kidneys different from those of a cave dweller. Indeed, you share 60 percent of your genes with a banana, 90 percent with a mouse, and more than 99 percent with a chimpanzee. In other words, everything else that makes us human has depended on an evolution that is far more non-physical than physical. We invented ourselves, and as we did so, we brought our bodies along for the ride.

  How you invented yourself

  You have been inventing your body from the day you were born, and the reason you don’t see it that way is that the process comes so naturally. It’s easy to take for granted, and that’s the problem. The flaws you see in your body today aren’t inherent. They aren’t bad news delivered by your genes or mistakes made by Nature. Your choices each played a part in the body you created, either consciously or unconsciously.

  Here’s a list of physical changes that you have made and continue to make. It’s a very basic list, all medically valid, and yet hardly any part of your body is excluded.

  Every skill you learn creates a new neural network in your brain.

  Every new thought creates a unique pattern of brain activity.

  Any change in mood is conveyed via “messenger molecules” to every part of the body, altering the basic chemical activity of each cell.

  Every time you exercise, you alter your skeleton and muscles.

  Every bite of food you eat alters your daily metabolism, electrolyte balance, and proportion of fat to muscle.

  Your sexual activity and the decision to reproduce affects your hormonal balance.

  The stress level to which you subject yourself raises and lowers your immune system.

  Every hour of total inactivity creates muscle atrophy.

  Your genes tune in to your thoughts and emotions, and in mysterious ways they switch on and off according to your desires.

  Your immune system gets stronger or weaker in response to being in a loving or unloving relationship.

  Crises of grief, loss, and loneliness increase the risk of disease and shortened lifespan.

  Using your mind keeps your brain young; not using your brain leads to its decline.

  Using these tools, you invented your body and can reinvent it anytime you want. The obvious question is, Why haven’t we reinvented our bodies already? Certainly the problems have been staring us in the face long enough. The answer is that solving small pieces of the puzzle has been much easier than seeing the whole. Medicine is practiced in specialties. If you fall in love, an endocrinologist can report on the decline of stress hormones in your endocrine system. A psychiatrist can report on your improved mood, which a neurologist can confirm through a brain scan. A dietician may be worried that you’re losing your appetite; on the other hand, what you do eat is digested better. And so it goes. No one can provide you with a complete picture.

  To make matters more complex, because the body is so fluid and so superbly multitasking, it’s difficult to imagine there’s any one step to take that could lead to transformation. Right now you may be in love, pregnant, running down a country lane, eating a new diet, losing sleep or gaining it, doing better at your job or worse. Your body is nothing less than a universe in motion.

  Reinventing the body means changing the whole universe.

  Trying to tinker with your body misses the forest for the trees. One person fixates on her weight, another trains for a marathon, and yet another is adopting a vegan diet while her friend is dealing with menopause. Thomas Edison didn’t tinker with building a better kerosene lamp; he abandoned the use of fire—the only human-generated source of light since prehistoric times—and broke through to a new source. That was a quantum leap in creativity. If you are the creator of your body, what is the quantum leap awaiting you?

  Going back to the source

  If we use Edison as our model, the last great reinvention of the body followed certain principles:

  The body is an object.

  It fits together like a complicated machine.

  The machine breaks down over time.

  The body’s machinery is constantly attacked by germs and other microbes, which are also tiny machines on a molecular scale.

  But these are all outmoded ideas. If any of these assumptions were true, then the following couldn’t happen: a new syndrome recently appeared called electro-sensitivity, in which people complain that simply being near electricity causes discomfort and pain. Electro-sensitivity is taken seriously enough that at least one country, Sweden, will pay to have a person’s house shielded from the electromagnetic field if they are diagnosed as electro-sensitive.

  The widespread fear that cell phones harm the body has reached no definitive conclusion, but it seemed far easier to test whether there is such a thing as electro-sensitivity. In one experiment, subjects were put inside an electromagnetic field (we are surrounded by these every day in the form of micr
owaves, radio and television signals, cellphone transmissions, and power lines), and as the field was turned on or off, they were asked to say what they felt. It turned out that nobody did better than random. People who described themselves as electro-sensitive did no better than anyone else, which means no better than random guessing.

  However, this didn’t settle the matter. In a follow-up experiment, people were given cell phones and asked if they could feel pain or discomfort when they placed the phones against their heads. The electro-sensitive people described a range of discomfort, including sharp pain and headache, and by looking at their brains with MRIs, it could be seen that they were telling the truth. The pain centers in their brains were activated. The catch is that the cell phones were dummies and were emitting no electrical signals of any kind. Therefore, the mere expectation that they would be in pain was enough to create pain in certain people, and the next time they used a real cell phone, they would suffer from the syndrome.

  Before you dismiss this as a psychosomatic effect, pause and consider. If someone says he is electro-sensitive, and his brain acts as if he is electro-sensitive, the condition is real—at least for him. Psychosomatic conditions are real for those who experience them. But it’s just as true to say that they created the conditions. In fact, there is a much larger phenomenon at work here—the ebb and flow of new diseases that may be new creations. Another example is anorexia and related eating disorders like bulimia. A generation ago, such disorders were rare, and now they appear to be endemic, especially among teenage girls. Premenstrual syndrome, or PMS, had its heyday but now seems to be fading. Cutting, a form of self-mutilation in which the patient, usually a young woman, secretly slices superficial wounds into her skin with a razor or knife, appears to be on the rise after a period of almost total obscurity.

  When such new disorders appear, the first reaction is always that the victims created a sickness that is essentially imaginary or psychotic. Yet when the disorder spreads, and doctors find that patients cannot turn off the switch that turned the illness on, there can be only one conclusion. Self-created symptoms are real.