by Dr. Deepak Chopra
Freedom of thought is our natural state; being trapped by the past isn’t. We are still in that state of liberation, should we choose to take advantage of it. The pivotal issue is the metastasis of “I,” which has taken free will too far in the service of anger, fear, greed, blind selfishness, and all the rest.
Once we see this, we can understand how personal relationships get sabotaged. Two people fall in love and get married. After the honeymoon, they must relate to each other in all kinds of ways—doing household chores, making money, scheduling time for things to do together or apart—and “I” does its job of managing one situation after another. But if you are having a fight over family finances, your ego brings up anger, the need to win, and the stubborn desire to be right. If the argument gets heated enough, grievances over older wrangles come bubbling up to the surface. Unless you are careful, a trivial disagreement gets bitterly personal. What has been lost in the heat of the moment is the underlying love that sparked the relationship in the first place. That’s the larger reality, which “I” single-mindedly excludes so that it can win a small and usually pointless argument.
Two people occupy a small dot on the map. Now expand the territory on a global scale. The human race is ravaging the planet because seven billion people, acting on the advice of “I,” prefer local experience over solving a global problem. Wars break out and populations incur death and destruction on a massive scale because the larger territory—maintaining amicable peace—is sabotaged by the anger generated by every “I” choosing to follow its irrational, angry, hostile agenda.
The bottom line is that “I” firmly believes it can manage reality, and yet human history is littered with its abject failures. Even the basic assumption that “I” is in contact with reality is false. At this moment you have no actual experience of the quantum field, from which everything in creation springs. You have no experience of the atoms and molecules that constitute your body, nor of the operation of your cells, nor of the brain itself. It seems strange that the human brain has no idea of its very existence. Viewing a brain under the surgeon’s knife or while dissecting a body in medical school is merely the secondhand observation of a mushy gray thing with grooves running across its outer surface. Nothing observable hints that this mushy stuff processes consciousness.
At the bottom, “I” polices our experience to make sure that life remains local and not infinite. Infinity is the ego’s enemy, because infinity is the whole map, not just dots and pins stuck in it here and there. To let go of “I” is to embrace infinity. Only by being comfortable with our infinite potential can we discover that reality doesn’t need editing. Wholeness is where we belong. Once we begin to chop wholeness into bits and pieces, the ego takes over to manage each one, bit by bit, and, whether we realize it or not, it depletes us physically and mentally. So we need to investigate whether infinity is a livable environment. If it is, then letting go of the ego can be justified. And no matter what “I” has done to improve life, we may begin to realize that living in wholeness is better.
About the author:
Acknowledged as one of the world’s pioneers in integrative medicine and personal transformation, Dr. Deepak Chopra is the founder of The Chopra Foundation and co founder of Chopra Global and Jiyo.com. He has written numerous New York Times bestsellers, which have been translated into over 43 languages.
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