Cosmic Evolution Q & A: Current Understanding of the Universe By Deepak Chopra, M.D. and Joel Primack


Deepak Chopra: How did the universe begin?

Joel Primack
: We have detailed information about the Big Bang. The universe began in a very hot, dense state. About 400,000 years after the beginning, the universe had cooled enough that atoms formed and that’s when the heat radiation of the Big Bang was released—what we call the cosmic background radiation. It comes from every direction around us. We have studied it in detail and it confirms the predictions of the modern theory in amazing detail.

Deepak: Do we know the cause, what triggered the Big Bang?

Joel: There’s a hypothesis, called Cosmic Inflation, that very neatly describes how the Big Bang started, what put the bang in the Big Bang and made the universe expand so rapidly, and what produced the energy and matter.

Cosmic Inflation makes many predictions, and every prediction that’s been tested has turned out to be right. So most cosmologists—physicists and astronomers who study the whole universe—think that Cosmic Inflation must be pretty close to the truth.

Of course the question then is, “What happened before that?” There’s a theory called Eternal Inflation and Cosmic Inflation would just be the last moment of Eternal Inflation in our part of the universe. But we have not yet been able to test Eternal Inflation.

Deepak: Is Cosmic Inflation the beginning of the Big Bang, or before the Big Bang? Was there a “Planck Epoch?”

Joel: If Eternal Inflation preceded Cosmic Inflation, there probably never was a Planck Epoch. Eternal Inflation would operate at very high energies, but lower than the highest energy possible, the Planck energy.

Deepak: Was there never a beginning then?

Joel: It’s a controversial question. There was a paper that claimed to prove that Eternal Inflation must have started a finite time ago, so it’s only eternal in the future, not the past. But a loophole was found in that paper, so the answer is not clear. The farther back you go, the hazier it gets.

Deepak: In Cosmic Inflation, the universe triples in size every tiny unit of time, and triples again and again—and then this exponential expansion stops and the universe expands much more slowly. Do we know the mechanism of that?

Joel: Cosmic inflation is really the name of a class of theories. In such theories, Cosmic Inflation ends quickly and converts to cosmic expansion. Many such theories all make similar predictions that seem compatible with the universe we observe. The details can, in principle, be worked out with enough data, and we’re beginning to obtain such data.

There was a claim that the BICEP experiment had seen evidence of gravity waves from the Cosmic Inflation era. But the BICEP group then worked together with the European Planck satellite team and their revised conclusion was that their original paper was mistaken. The region of the sky that BICEP looked at from the South Pole was contaminated by dust in our own Milky Way galaxy, and what they saw was almost certainly the dust signal.

That team and other teams are doing much more precise experiments at several wavelengths that will allow them to disentangle the effects of dust and other “foregrounds,” so over the next few years we are going to know the answer.

If it turns out that we can see the gravity waves from Cosmic Inflation, we will be able to reconstruct what happened. This would allow us to get close to the Planck scale, the highest energies and smallest things allowed by physics—a very exciting possibility!

Deepak: In your book, The View from the Center of the Universe, you say that the Big Bang occurred everywhere. Please explain that.

Joel: The entire visible universe was a small region at the time of the Big Bang, and the stuff that would become our galaxy and us was deep inside it.

The early stage was very simple and smooth, with only small differences in the density of matter and energy in different regions—about 30 parts per million more here, and about 30 parts per million less there. But that was enough to cause tremendous differences later—galaxies formed here, no galaxies formed there. And in the observed universe we really do see such big “cosmic voids” with very few galaxies.

Deepak: Where did the energy come from for the Big Bang?

Joel: Almost all the energy during Cosmic Inflation was in a quantum field called the Inflaton. If such a field isn’t at its lowest energy state, it will automatically cause the exponentially rapid expansion of Cosmic Inflation. But the process also has to end very quickly as the Inflaton’s energy gets converted to the energy and matter of the universe.

Deepak: What happens then?

Joel: Actually, we know a lot about things that happened starting about a millionth of a second after the Big Bang, since physicists have explored the relevant processes in the laboratory.

In 1977, Steven Weinberg wrote a wonderful book called The First Three Minutes—it’s actually more like ten minutes—describing how most of the light elements were formed at that early era. The deuterium (heavy hydrogen) and most of the helium were formed then, and the theory predicted just how much of these light elements get formed.

We’ve now been able to measure precisely the amount of deuterium and fairly precisely the amount of helium, and the good agreement with theory is impressive. However, there may be a disagreement between theory and observation for the next lightest element, lithium.

Deepak: Is this evidence that if the values of the fundamental and cosmological parameters were any different, we couldn’t be here?

Joel: Yes, but it’s a little more complicated. There was a period when physicists were quite excited about these so-called “anthropic arguments,” which have to do with the universe being fine tuned so that creatures like us can exist.

The way they played that game was they kept all the constants of nature the same except for one, and showed that if you just changed that one even a little bit from what we measure it to be, our universe and creatures like us couldn’t exist. However, if you are allowed to change more than one constant at a time, then it turns out that creatures like us—carbon-based life—could exist in very different sorts of universes.

Deepak: How did galaxies come into existence?

Joel: Quantum effects during Cosmic Inflation create the slight differences in density from place to place that make galaxies form in some places and not in others. These quantum fluctuations are on microscopic scales, but they get blown up to astronomical scales by the tremendous expansion during Cosmic Inflation.

Regions that start slightly denser than average expand a little slower. Gravity slows them down. Regions that start out slightly less dense than average expand a little faster. Astronomers call regions of higher density “richer” and regions of lower density “poorer.” Gravity makes richer regions richer and poorer regions poorer. There are never any exceptions—that’s why it’s theultimate Scrooge principle!

Richer regions are where galaxies will ultimately form. Poor regions grow into big cosmic voids where hardly any galaxies form. And so the structure of the universe that we see today has most of the galaxies in sheets surrounding the big cosmic voids and the galaxies tend to lie along lines that we call filaments. The distribution of the galaxies in space agrees remarkably well with the theoretical predictions.

Deepak: And now we have a situation where 70 percent of the universe is Dark Energy, 25 percent or so is Dark Matter, and only about 5 percent is the sort of stuff that atoms are made of. What is Dark Energy?

Joel: Ha—we wish we knew! We don’t know what Dark Energy is. We don’t even know why it’s there, or what role it played in the early universe. But now it’s making the universe expand faster and faster. Effectively, dark energy makes space repel space.

Deepak: This expansion, I’m told, is faster than the speed of light.

Joel: Rather, what’s happening is that the whole universe is expanding. If you are on an expanding racetrack—if you look farther and farther away—things will be moving away from you faster and faster just because they are farther along the expanding racetrack.

At a certain distance, galaxies will be moving away from you faster than the speed of light. This doesn’t contradict relativity—it’s what relativity predicts.

Deepak: So this explains how the most distant objects in the visible universe are about 47 billion light years away even though the universe is less than 14 billion years old.

Joel: Yes.

Deepak: What is the 25 or 26 percent that we call Dark Matter?

Joel: I proposed back in 1982, with the late Heinz Pagels, that the modern theory of supersymmetry gives us a natural candidate for the dark matter. Supersymmetry is probably the best idea we have to go beyond our standard model of particle physics, and supersymmetry is the basis of string theory.

If supersymmetry is right, all the fundamental particles we know—the electron, quarks, the photon, and so on—have superpartner particles that we haven’t discovered yet. The superpartner particles must be much heavier. And they have funny names:

Squarks (the partners of the quarks)
Sleptons (the partners of the leptons)
Photino (the partner of the photon)
The lightest of these particles—perhaps the photino—might be the dark matter.

Deepak: Is it true that the dark matter is not atomic?

Joel: Yes, the dark matter has nothing to do with protons, neutrons, or electrons—the stuff that atoms are made of.

Deepak: It doesn’t absorb light or emit light?

Joel: Not to any great extent.

Deepak: We are made up of atoms, right?

Joel: Yes. In fact, we’re mostly made of a very special kind of atom—not the kind that came out of the Big Bang (except for hydrogen), but rather atoms that formed in stars.

Deepak: So how do we interact with something that’s not made of what we’re made of?

Joel: A good example is neutrinos. To solve a mystery and avoid a catastrophe in physics—the breaking of fundamental laws like conservation of angular momentum and energy—Wolfgang Pauli suggested that there’s a new particle, subsequently named the neutrino by Enrico Fermi.

Pauli was very diffident about this proposal because he thought he was proposing something that could not be tested. But now we have measured many properties of neutrinos. We’ve discovered three different kinds of neutrinos and that they can turn into each other. We understand a great deal about neutrinos.

Deepak: Are they observable?

Joel: Absolutely! We can do experiments about neutrinos.

Deepak: How is something observable if it’s not atomic?

Joel: Well neutrinos are weird. They only have weak interactions. Their masses are so small that their gravitational interactions are essentially negligible.

Deepak: Can dark matter be of the same category?

Joel: Yes, except that dark matter has a great deal of mass. If dark matter is the lightest superpartner, it is a weakly interacting massive particle, a WIMP. Then it would interact with ordinary matter like neutrinos. But since it would be very massive—in fact, it would be most of the mass of the universe—it would have a great deal of gravity. So it’s a combination of those two ideas.

Deepak: So we’re now in a situation where 95 percent of the universe is invisible?

Joel: Correct!

Deepak: It’s at the moment unknown, possibly even unknowable. And about 5 percent is atomic matter.

Joel: Yes, mostly hydrogen and helium that came out of the Big Bang. The heavier elements—which we and the earth are mostly made of—are only about 0.01 percent of the cosmic density.

Deepak: The atomic matter has the particle-like thingness about them, but they are also waves that can’t be localized.

Joel: No, waves can be localized, with greater or less precision. The better you know their location the worse you can know their momentum. If you want to localize it in time, then you know less about its energy. These are the “uncertainty relations” of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is the best-tested theory in all of science.

Deepak: But do we really understand quantum mechanics? There are so many interpretations!

Joel: Yes, the old Niels Bohr interpretation is often paraphrased “shut up and calculate!” The theory makes very precise predictions that we can calculate. There’s no dispute about the calculations.

The problem is that if you try to describe what’s going on in ordinary terms, there are many different kinds of language that you can apply that sound very different—but that don’t seem to have any different implications.

Deepak: It works, but what does it mean? We don’t know what caused the Big Bang. As Sir Arthur Eddington said, “Something unknown is doing we don’t know what.” On the one hand, experiments verify the theories, and yet what’s going on?

Joel: I don’t think we should be surprised at the growth of mystery with the growth of knowledge. Newton is supposed to have said that to himself he was like a young child at the seashore, every so often picking up a particularly beautiful stone or shell, while he looked out at the great ocean of ignorance before him.

We live in an island of scientific understanding. As we learn more the island grows, but so does the size of the shoreline where ignorance meets knowledge.

Deepak: So science has expanded the mystery of existence?

Joel: Precisely! And we shouldn’t be surprised at that. The more we learn, the more questions we ask. It doesn’t look like science will end. It’s hard to conceive of an ending caused by a lack of interesting questions.

The questions we can ask now are very different questions. We didn’t know there was dark matter or dark energy before. Now we know, and of course we want to know what they are. We have a very elaborate program to try to answer those questions.

For example, experiments deep underground (to protect from cosmic rays) may detect the dark matter particles. The U.S. is going to increase the sensitivity of our most sensitive experiment by a factor of 100. If that experiment doesn’t discover WIMPs, it could rule the theory out. But it may discover WIMPs.

There is also evidence from the Fermi Gamma Ray satellite that may indicate that dark matter is annihilating itself in the center of our Milky Way galaxy. The evidence is tantalizing, but it isn’t convincing yet. A lot of other data may materialize in the next few years. We might be on the threshold of making a great discovery, but I don’t know what the answer is going to be. No one knows yet!

Deepak: I want to bring up the element of consciousness. In your book you say that we need sentience to know this. I was reading Freeman Dyson’s book, Infinite in All Directions, where he suggests that there is sentience at all levels from the atomic to the cosmic level. I was in a debate with our friend Richard Dawkins, and I quoted Dyson. He screamed at me that Dyson never said that. The sentence I quoted is that “every experiment forces the atom to make a choice.”

I wrote to Dyson, and he responded that there are three riddles that have confounded him all his life: the unpredictable movement of atoms, a universe fine-tuned for mind and life, and our own consciousness. They seem to have some connection to each other. Any comment on that?

Joel: (Laughs.) Freeman Dyson has written many essays over the years—the first collection was called Disturbing the Universe—that are full of wonderful insights, wisdom, and questions. Dyson also wrote the first article that discussed in detail the distant future of a universe that goes on forever.

These are great mysteries, and I think they are going to keep us busy for a very long time—both scientifically and philosophically. I don’t expect to have easy answers to any of them.

Deepak: Is science a product of consciousness?

Joel: Of course. And the connection between mind and brain is a fascinating mystery. My father-in-law had a stroke, which drastically changed his consciousness—so there is clearly a connection. You are an expert on these things from your medical education and practice.

Deepak: Are mind and brain the same thing?

Joel: I don’t think so.

Deepak: Then you are a dualist?

Joel: Not exactly. What’s going on in my mind was drastically influenced by what happened in other peoples’ minds throughout history. The language I use is not something I invented, it’s something I learned—it’s a cultural creation.

We’re interacting not just on the level of the words, but also in other ways. You smile, and I have a warm feeling. It’s visceral. We know that the brain has these tight connections to the heart, stomach, and so on. To imagine that it’s all in one’s head is crazy.

Deepak: If we are non-dualists, we have to ask if the fundamental reality of the universe is physical or non-physical. Or don’t those words mean anything?

Joel: The trouble with the word “physical” is that most people think of chairs and tables and things like that, which are solid. But we now know that’s just a macroscopic description that has little to do with how these things look on the microscopic level.

We can now see individual atoms. We know how things work on the atomic level, and it’s very very different. Calling something physical—if it invokes this common-sense meaning—is very misleading.

Deepak: Is there a fundamental ground to reality?

Joel: As far as we know, quantum mechanics is pretty fundamental. But at some level there is a conflict between quantum theory—which describes how things work on the level of the very small—and general relativity—our theory of space, time, and gravity.

Until we have an encompassing theory that explains how they fit together—and also how to extrapolate beyond their individual domains of validity—we won’t know how far we can trust either quantum mechanics or general relativity.

Deepak: What’s your prediction of where science is going to take us in the next few years?

Joel: I think we’re going to learn wonderful new things about how the universe evolved and how galaxies formed. We’re still in the process of writing papers about some fascinating discoveries from the biggest project in the history of Hubble Space Telescope.

I think we’re going to discover the dark matter, or else rule out current theories. We may discover a great deal about the nature of dark energy. We have a bunch of new telescopes on the way and wonderful new projects that are underway or about to start. I think the next decade or so is going to be a phenomenal period of discovery.

Deepak: Is the mystery of existence going to expand?

Joel: Yes! Suppose we find out what the dark matter is, and it’s some kind of elementary particle. It has to be something completely different from everything we know, so it will be the beginning of the exploration of a whole new world. I don’t foresee an end to this exploration any time soon.

Source: Chopra


William Meader – Buddha at the Gas Pump Interview

An influential and respected teacher of The Esoteric Philosophy, William Meader has established an international reputation for his gift as a communicator of this spiritual philosophy. His extensive teaching program includes a diverse array of workshops and lectures devoted to nurturing a deeper understanding of the spiritual path, both from an individual and global perspective. William Meader resides in Oregon, and presents regular workshops in the United States, Europe, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

Wisdom Bites – Esoteric Astrology

Wisdom Bites – Esoteric Astrology ~bite sized wisdom on the go~ Speakers: Heidi Robbins & William Meader







The Bedsit Epiphany – Eckhart Tolle

By Oliver Burkeman, THE GUARDIAN (UK)


















Tolle on using your mind

On problems
‘Narrow your

On suffering

On life

On death

Source: Eckhart Tolle

“I Am” – Rupert Spira

Published on 27 Jul 2018
A man wants to know who is making the inquiry into his true nature.

“Does God exist? | J. Krishnamurti”


The Royal way to approach suffering….Rupert Spira

Published on 26 Jul 2018

No dimensions and no location……..Rupert Spira

Published on 19 Jul 2018
To be taken to myself in the actual experience of having no dimensions, is literally mind blowing.

Kosi – 2nd Buddha at the Gas Pump Interview

Kosi is a Direct Path Advaita Vedanta Satsang Teacher in the Śiva Kaśyapa Lineage. This teaching is powerful support for a dynamic shift in your consciousness from the fear, sadness, anger, anxiety, and frustration of your mind to the indescribable peace and happiness of your heart. Satsang with Kosi is an extremely potent initiation and transmission of the non-dual teaching of Sri Bhagavan Ramana Maharshi and her holiness Sri Amma Karunamayi.

Organic Awakening by Kosi Sunyata (Author)

This little book packs a punch. It is the code breaker of enlightenment that reveals the genetics of suffering and how to break free of patterns of fear, sadness, anxiety and other forms of suffering. This book has an unexpected twist that offers shockingly simple and deep teaching. Thoughtout the book there is such a deep pointing to the living truth that it is not uncommond for readers to have direct experience of the happiness you are in the core of your being. One reader said, “Organic Awakening is full of surprises. At one point I laughed out loud and kept laughing for over two hours! This books says what can never be said.”

What is the Genetic Mind?

Recognizing the genetic mind is essential for breaking free of deeply engrained patterns of suffering. The genetic mind is so strong that inquiry, silence, and the mantra are essential for burning through this very resilient veil of mind. For more info please visit

Awaken Interviews Carolin Myss – The Real Heart of a Spiritual Journey Is the Pursuit of ‘What Is Truth?’

And I just want to thank you personally, for sharing your time with us. I’ve been influenced by your books and your teachings for many, many years. And I want to thank you on behalf of our Awaken readers and viewers.

Caroline Myss: My pleasure.

DONNA: They will be thrilled to hear what you have to say. And for those of you who may not know, Caroline Myss is the author of Anatomy of the Spirit, Entering the Castle…one of my favorites, Defy Gravity, Why People Don’t Heal and How They Can, and a roster of others. You have been so prolific over the years and you started as a medical intuitive…


DONNA: And with that, I just want to jump in and ask you, do you still consider yourself a medical intuitive or a spiritual teacher?

CAROLINE: Both. One’s not mutually exclusive but my work as a medical intuitive brought me… It was a natural path, which kind of unfolded because I never knew there was anything like a medical intuitive. That wasn’t my intention to do that. I was headed into the world of publishing and hopefully I wanted to be a fiction author. That was my big dream. I mean, fortunately, heaven put me together and it gave me a genius for something I had never even heard of and no talent for something I wanted to do.

DONNA: I have to jump in and share this with you. I thought, don’t share that with her, it will be silly…but you said it before I did. I heard you say that in an interview before…that you wanted to be a novelist. I never knew that about you, until recently. I thought, isn’t that fascinating?…because I grew up wanting to be a singer and I wasn’t given a gift to sing. And I ended up a teacher just like you did. And so, I related on a personal level, so much, when you told that story.

CAROLINE: It’s so true. And my father would say to me when I was growing up…which was a typical piece of guidance from the era that I grew up in…when most women who went to college became teachers or nurses… And so, he would say, “I don’t care what you do when you go to college, as long you become a teacher or a nurse.” Because he was looking after my wellbeing. And I remember thinking, I can’t do either of those things. Either one, for me, was the kiss of death. Because I associated teaching with being with kindergarten kids or five-year-olds or six-year-olds, and the idea of being in a classroom with children all my life… UGH! I have never changed a diaper. I am not kid friendly. And then the idea of being a nurse and sticking needles in people… And I admire these people. I do, but when I thought about it, those were my associations. So, to end up being a teacher…and I’m good at it…it’s funny how that works. The skill of being a medical intuitive…I was always very intuitive. I always flew in the intuitive world as my natural habitat. And I always looked at people as How can you function without being intuitive? Even as a child, I would think, ‘How can you function?’ How can you function in the world, not seeing the world this clearly?

DONNA: Is it enough to be good at something? Do you also have to be passionate?

CAROLINE: Well, I’m not sure. That’s kind of a luxury item. Passion is a luxury item if you really think about it. It’s kind of a high-end grace. And if you look at the world, do you think everybody is passionate? Really? Do you?

Donna: No.

CAROLINE: And do you think it’s really realistic to say, “Hey, everybody!… Follow your passion!” Do you think that is really advice that goes down easy for all of humanity?

DONNA: I’ve been wondering this for many years. And so, the next question is, where does enthusiasm come from, in the absence of passion, for those that don’t have the luxury of following their passion?

CAROLINE: Well, the operative word you use here is “following.” Why do you assume it’s a journey? What do you associate with passion that you would say “following?”

DONNA: I suppose I think of it as some kind of calling.

CAROLINE: How is passion a calling?

DONNA: Or, it’s kind of an internal being lit up on fire.

CAROLINE: About what? You associate it with a career. You are career driven. For you, passion is a career.

DONNA: So, it might be directed toward something else like serving and we can channel that in many different ways?

CAROLINE: It could be experiences or it could be perceptual. But white people are practical. White Western people… They come from that kind of God. They come from a practical, Western, Christian God. It’s very practical. So that association with passion is that it has to be a practical, career-oriented thing. It comes right out of the middle class.

DONNA: So, can we be practical and passionate at the same time, or can we cultivate that sense of “being on fire” in a practical world?

CAROLINE: You know, like mystical passion is not career. It’s experiential. It’s internal…experiential. It doesn’t convert to occupational. That’s the mystical passion. It’s a relationship with truth. As Buddha would say, “Breaking through illusions.”

DONNA: If we have that, it doesn’t much matter what we do with our career.

CAROLINE: (Laughing) Get your head out of the career, will you! The mystical understanding of passion as a mystic would understand it…the passionate grace is about the pursuit, the experience of revelation. The truth of shedding the scales of one’s interior. I’ll give you an example. Francis of Assisi hears a voice and it says “Francis…rebuild my church.” He hears this voice and eventually it becomes clear that this voice, that is speaking to him, is Jesus. And he becomes impassioned to communicate that reality is real. That it is not an imagined being. This communication between that world and this world is real. That becomes his passion. The truth behind the story of Jesus is that it’s real. He becomes impassioned with a mystical truth. That becomes his passion.

DONNA: And would you say this finding of truth is behind every spiritual mission or journey?

CAROLINE: The real heart of a spiritual journey is the pursuit of what is truth? And letting truth reshape you. Like, in a very small way, the journey in my life, from realizing Catholicism wasn’t the only God. Ok, so I let that fall away. And eventually the larger truth…a long way down the road, was that all religions are costume parties. That the universe doesn’t have a religion. And eventually, that there is no God that looks like a human being. Eventually, that there is no earth-centric God. That is the reason that all religions are falling apart now. That moment has come. We have to release the myth that God looks like us, walks like us, operated the world of earth politics like us. That it’s the end of the road now. Leaving behind those myths in ourselves and the cosmos. That’s the pursuit of truth. If this isn’t true, then what is?

DONNA: And so, what is God, once we leave that fictional sense of God behind?

CAROLINE: What is God? Well from my point of view, to the best of what I can see from where I am perched right now… This is where my own inner journey as a mystic has intersected with what I have learned as a medical intuitive. My journey as a medical intuitive started out…I didn’t even know we had chakras. I came right out of a school system where I never even took science. Much less, eastern religions and chakras and all that. So, when I started to do readings and sensed the human energy system, this was virgin territory for me. And I began to realize that we breathe into something. We connect. We interact with our health in a very intimate way. The first chunk of my years was concerned with figuring out, how is that we have an intimate relationship with our health and with our illness? And, do certain stresses create illnesses?

What I realized, is how incredibly specific the design of our thoughts is. But I didn’t have an interest in healing, as such. I didn’t have an interest in illness. Then I developed an interest in not healing, but why we don’t heal and why we we’re afraid of healing. And that brought me into a different vocabulary. I needed a different vocabulary and I didn’t even realize it…to begin to access human nature. And the critical word was “power.” I began to research our relationship to power. And that changed my understanding of human nature and everything about us. And eventually, that led to the study of archetypes and our archetypal patterns. Our patterns of power.

DONNA: So, you’ve brought up a few things I want to talk about. In your book, Why People Don’t Heal and How They Can, it seems to all come down to…why we’re losing energy…power. You mention eastern philosophy and I think of Buddha’s big question, “Why do people suffer?” Why do we suffer? Why don’t we heal? Does the same thing answer both questions? And in other words, are we miserable for the same reasons we are sick?

CAROLINE: That’s a good question! Are we miserable for the same reasons we are sick? In some cases, yes. In Buddhist language, Buddha said…and I fully agree with this…I couldn’t agree more that suffering happens because we want things to be other than the way they are. And we don’t accept things for the way they are. Change is constant. So, you say, “what is God?” Now, this is where the question began and we are still in the…think of that one question…of which, this is a sub-question. Why do people suffer? What is the nature of God? The nature of God…then if you say, “What is God?”… You look at the nature of all that is, to identify God. The nature of all that is…is change. So, there we put on the table one characteristic of God is change.

How do we know what God is? God has to apply to all things. All things in the universe. All things in the universe change. All things in the universe have a pattern. All things in the universe are consistent. They are what they are without deviation from pattern. They are impersonal. Regardless of who you are…what you are. Gravity is gravity. You and I will both fall off a bridge if we jump, regardless of how many candles you lit and how many I did not. We will fall. So, the laws of the universe are governing rulers of all life. What is God? God is law. The nature of God is law. How does your body work? Your body works on laws. The laws of science, the laws of biology, the laws of reproduction, aging… How does disease work? It works on law.

DONNA: And yet we can defy that with the miraculous.

CAROLINE: Ah, Ah, Ah, Ah. You don’t defy anything! Even that is subject to law. If you understand mysticism, you are simply working at laws in a higher realm.

DONNA: For example, when we talk about grace and jumping out of that predictable time pattern and what society tells us is normal for healing?

CAROLINE: What you tell yourself is normal for healing. But what is a miracle? A miracle is when heaven alters a law and puts it into mystical time just for you. It takes it out of chronos and puts it into…time for you.

DONNA: So, it’s not that we’ve defied law, it’s that we’ve jumped into another realm, where different laws apply. Would that be correct to say?

CAROLINE: You haven’t jumped anywhere. It’s that your soul, your consciousness, has become receptive to the experience of timelessness. And because of faith…and it’s not just faith…this is a really important thing to understand…it’s not just faith, but a part of your self-esteem. The manner in which you esteem your psychic self, your consciousness, has become strong enough to sustain an experience that is an out-lier…that stands apart from the experience familiar with the collective. That is what a miracle is. Miracles don’t happen to most people. Not because they are not holy enough or good enough, but because they are unable to sustain the consequences of having a miracle.

DONNA: Could you explain that? Are they afraid of the consequences? Meaning, they might say they want to heal, but is there something in us that actually doesn’t?

CAROLINE: That’s one reason. Another reason, of course…we are still along the river of do we make our own suffering? This is one of the reasons that we make our own suffering. In the stages of our growth…people start us in that fragile stage of looking for identity by looking at how others see them. I don’t know, I’ll wait for someone else to notice if I look okay.

DONNA: That’s the first place we lose power…

CAROLINE: No, we’ve never had any power. We have to amass…we don’t lose power. You don’t lose it. We start out as collective beings within our tribe. And then as we mature, we begin to… We start out like eau de toilette, then cologne and then hopefully, perfume. So, nobody starts out perfume. So, our sense of self in a tribe is like toilet water. We’re a collective. We are a “we.” And when people are at that stage, their sense of self esteem is a collective sense. We’re like young chicks trying to learn how to walk in the world. So, we dress like everybody and we look like everybody. We cut our hair like everybody. Because we are trying to find out what our identity is. Then we begin to break free of that and go through that painful stage of trying to develop a sense of self. And become cologne from toilet water. We’re trying to develop our own stronger fragrance.

DONNA: So, would it be truer to put it this way…it’s not that we are losing power by investing in other people’s opinions; it’s that we are prolonging our own growth…

CAROLINE: We are sensing…we are developing a sense of self, but at some point, we have to start deciding this is who I am. And this is my boundary between what I seek from other people and what I’ll allow from other people. This is where many people don’t have that boundary. And what they do is…they need so much affirmation from others that even when they have an idea…I have an idea…do you think it’s a good idea? Do you think it’s okay? They still need to take everything that goes on in them and run to the collective for opinion. So now you have an experience, like a miracle…like a feeling. That happens out of time and space and nobody else can validate it. And not only that, it’s an experience that falls into the category of enviable. It suggests that there is something special about you. That for the collective, hits the wrong button. What’s special about you? So, you come over and you say to them, I’ve been healed of this. The scientific community doesn’t approve of that. A lot of people will say “maybe you weren’t sick in the first place…maybe you really weren’t that sick.”

DONNA: So, there is something in the collective that doesn’t want to acknowledge…

CAROLINE: That you had something given to you that was not given to them. And in many cases, what will happen is, the person who was healed…if they cannot sustain the feeling…knowing that they did have that experience and I don’t need your validation…I know what I went through…most…there are so many times that it would make that person angrier. Because you didn’t validate it. That, in fact, you are not strong enough to sustain an experience by themselves…keep it to themselves, regardless of what people think.

DONNA: And so, what would you say is the biggest thing that holds us back from having that kind of experience or allowing that in?

CAROLINE: We still need to experience things collectively.

Continued in Part II…


A Spiritual Mystery: Does God Listen to Prayers? (Part III) – Deepak Chopra, M.D


This quick summary will raise eyebrows if someone denies that the inner and outer worlds are connected. (See the first and second posts in this series for the reasoning behind the union of these two domains of reality.) The world’s wisdom traditions don’t run into this obstacle, which is peculiar to modern materialism. Yet in a way it’s good to start with a blank slate. What makes any intention come true? Three vital elements are at work, as mentioned in the first post of this series:

How deep into the mind is the intention coming from?
How steady is your focus?
How fluid is your intention?

Depth of Awareness Is Samadhi

What helps Samadhi:

Calm, peaceful surroundings
Lack of mental agitation
Absence of stress
Minimal distractions
What hurts Samadhi: the opposite of the above

Steady Mental Focus Is Dharana

What helps Dharana:

Clear thinking
Acting purposefully
Not losing sight of the goal
The ability to stick with a mental task
What hurts Dharana:

Mental confusion
Conflicted desires
Lack of self-knowledge
Fantasy and daydreaming
Short attention span
A craving to escape the self
Fluid Awareness Is Dhyana


What helps Dhyana:

Being relaxed and easy
Acceptance of things as they are
Putting a value on being
Believing in the wisdom of uncertainty
Allegiance to a higher level of intelligence that organizes reality
What hurts Dhyana:

Controlling yourself and others
Insistence on rules and routines
Compulsive behavior
Inability to believe that the universe supports you


Source: Chopra

The Ultimate Prayer – Rupert Spira

Eckhart Tolle 2018#Unhappiness is optional!#

Darshan with Igor Kufayev – at a Glance

Published on Jul 18, 2018


A Spiritual Mystery: Does God Listen to Prayers? – Deepak Chopra Part II

To say that prayers are answered isn’t the same as saying that God answers prayers…

In the first case, a thought manifests as reality. You wish, intend, or ask for an outcome, and the outcome appears. In the second case, a supernatural being in the sky listens to millions of requests every day and kindly responds to a few while turning his back on the vast majority. The first post in this series was devoted to a consciousness-based explanation for prayers as opposed to a religious explanation.

The question automatically arises: If answered and unanswered prayers have a basis in our own awareness, what creates the difference? Here, I think, the religious explanation leads to serious difficulties. If you pray to be healed, for example, and the healing doesn’t come, religious thinking puts the blame on you. God has not granted your prayer, the reasoning goes, because you don’t have enough faith. Or you didn’t surrender to his will. Or you have secret sins in your heart that you haven’t repented of. These are time-honored explanations, and the problem with them—as with the existence of God—is that they can’t be proved one way or another. Does God hate you? Is God simply unfair? These are questions that have no basis for a valid answer.

The Mysterious Realm of Cause and Effect
On the other hand, consciousness is undoubtedly real. How to explain its origins remains a mystery, but we all think, and one mode of thinking is to intend for something to happen. If this something is within physical reach, you can reach for it. Grabbing a pizza, starting the car, getting out of bed in the morning—our choice to connect cause-and-effect in these cases is considered normal and natural. Other intentions seem supernatural because the link between cause and effect is invisible.

Yet the reach of the supernatural is actually quite arbitrary from culture to culture. An airplane might easily seem supernatural to an aboriginal culture, or the action of aspirin to eliminate pain, or the ability of a bullet to kill a deer. Before labeling this as a primitive reaction, consider that in modern society we have no explanation for where thoughts come from or how the invisible quantum field gives rise to the appearance of solid, tangible objects. We simply accept that some line of cause-and-effect exists, which will be clarified by future scientists. This article of faith breaks down when you ask the obvious question: Where do cause and effect come from? Ever since the quantum revolution of a century ago, Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle disabused physics of naive realism, the notion that reality matches what our five senses tell us.

We live in a universe that is radically different from what our eyes and ears perceive, and one major difference is known as “non-locality.” Even though a rose bush growing in your yard looks isolated, alone, an intact, it is actually an outcropping of the quantum field at the microscopic field, and its position in time and space isn’t local at all. The quanta from which matter arises are at bottom only probability waves, extending infinitely in all directions. At an even finer level all matter and energy vanish into the quantum vacuum, which is a field of pure potential which would appear to the naked eye as a void. So the rose bush is nowhere and everywhere at the same time.

Physics remains baffled about how the non-locality of quantum events turns into the obvious locality of a rose bush, which sits in your yard, not on Mars or the Andromeda galaxy. For a long time the scientific mind resisted the possibility that quantum behavior might apply in everyday life. Reality was divided into two compartments, one for quanta, which are allowed to act as strangely as they like, and one for rose bushes and other “classical” objects, which act in the normal cause-and-effect way. But the notion of two realities is uncomfortable, and in recent decades a genuine effort has been made to find the link between quantum and classical, so that we can have a single reality whose laws and rules are united at some deeper level.

What Happens to Prayers
This brings us back to prayers. Let’s say that a prayer is a classical event, or feels like one. You, a unique individual, have a particular request, which you voice in words that no one else is speaking at that instant. What if this classical event gets processed at a non-local level? The notion isn’t far-fetched, because it seems that the mind-body link does consist of fluctuations at the quantum level. If this is so, then any thought, not just a prayer, has quantum implications, and if that’s true, suddenly we have taken a trip into the realm of the non-local.

Your prayer will be answered, or not, depending on events happening out of sight—but not out of mind. By expanding our definition of mind, we can account for answered prayers, and even set down their behavior. Once a prayer is allowed to leave the classical world, it doesn’t become supernatural. It enters another level of Nature, and what happens there is fascinating.

View Here

Source: Chopra

Universal Powers of Consciousness

In this beautiful poetic tribute, Igor Kufayev speaks of working with the Universal Powers of Consciousness — the Feminine Powers of God — and how this can bring that richness of understanding, that everything is that pulsating, vibrating Ocean of Consciousness manifesting in a myriad of ways.

How to Deal with Expectations (Expectations vs. Reality) – Eckhart Tolle

Stop Living the Lie, the Lie We Live
How to Deal with Expectations (Expectations VS Reality), Eckhart Tolle.

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