Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul
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Yet here a mystery arises. When a mouse is reminded of happiness, it seeks to increase that response; the smell of food makes it hungry and it wants to eat. Human beings don’t pursue happiness in such a linear, predictable way. In terms of the brain, perversity makes no sense. If there is a happiness response, the natural thing would be to light it up as often as possible. Pigeons in cages will keep doing the same task a thousand times if it rewards them with a peck of food. Humans, on the other hand, go without food because we can override biology. A poor mother gives up her dinner so that her child can eat. A political idealist like Gandhi fasts to stir the conscience of his nation’s British oppressors. A supermodel subsists on crackers and lemons to conform to the shape that allows her to keep her job. In all these cases the word perverse might come to the mind of a brain researcher viewing the situation, but a better word is transcendent.
We override biology to go higher, to fulfill a vision of happiness that transcends the happiness we have today. Eating is a biological necessity, but transcending is a human necessity. For us, happiness improves when it has more meaning, purpose, intensity, and wholeness. For millions of people, those things are supplied by their jobs, houses, cars, money, and a family. But if you imagine that you will be perfectly fulfilled once you have all of them, there’s a surprise in store for you. The moment you achieve any plateau of satisfaction, a new horizon will open, and your desire to reach that horizon will be as strong as any desire you’ve ever felt.
That, ultimately, is the mystery. Human beings can never be satisfied with limited fulfillment. We are designed to transcend. As much as you might try to ignore the yearning inside you, it cannot be stifled. You will seek a better kind of happiness, and in so doing, you will be seeking your own mystery. It is that mystery which pertains to common humanity. It brings you up to the level of Buddha and Jesus, and brings them down to your level. The same yearning to transcend unites you, your soul, and every soul. Therefore, you will never have to ignite your passion to be whole. The passion is in you already. It is your birthright.
CONCLUSION:
“WHO MADE ME?”
Life moves forward by asking the right questions. The first question I remember asking (which my children asked me in turn) was “Who made me?” Children are naturally curious about where they came from. Children take creation personally, as well they should. Yet in their innocence they get steered in the wrong direction. They are told that God made them, or that their parents made them, without revealing the truth, which is that none of us really knows who made us. We have taken one of the most profound mysteries and dismissed it with clichés. We shrug and pass on the answer our parents gave us.
The truth can only be found by exploring who you are. After all, “Who made me?” is the most intimate and personal of questions. You can’t know where you belong in the world unless you know where you came from. If you believe the religious answer, that God made you, you will have certainty but no useful knowledge; the mystery of life has been outsourced to Genesis, and the book is closed. This is why people who want useful knowledge have turned to science. Science holds that creation is random, a matter of swirling gases exploding at the moment of the Big Bang. This view at least gives us an ongoing creation. Energy and matter will continue to produce new forms for billions of years, until an exhausted universe has no more energy to give. But a huge price is paid for choosing scientific knowledge. You no longer have a loving, caring Creator. Like every other object, your body is an accidental product of drifting stardust that could just as easily have been sucked out through a black hole. There is no ultimate meaning to life, and no purpose except the ones we make up and fight over.
I have never been able to accept either answer, and my doubt gave rise to these pages, where I’ve offered a third way. I have tried to reclaim the sacred nature of the body, which is like a forgotten miracle in its exquisite order and intelligence, while supplying useful knowledge of the kind science seeks to find. To uncover that knowledge, we’ve had to cross over into the invisible territory where materialism feels uncomfortable. But although such things as awareness, intelligence, creativity, and the soul are unseen, this should not delude us into dismissing them as unreal. They are real to us as humans, and that’s what counts in the end, because the mystery we want to solve is our own.
I hope the arguments I’ve made for reinventing the body in terms of energy and awareness come through to you as credible. I believe them fervently, as I believe in bringing the soul back into everyday life. But in the back of my mind I hear myself asking, as I did when I was four years old, “Who made me?”
It is with this, the simplest and yet most profound question, that a spiritual adage comes true. The journey is the answer. To find your creator, you must explore the universe until he (or she) appears. In ancient India it was held that all creation was compressed into a human being; therefore, to explore the universe, you needed only to explore yourself. But if you are an objectivist, you can turn the other way and explore the outer world. Following every clue, you will be led eventually to the last frontier of creation, and then you will be overwhelmed by awe. Albert Einstein declared that no great scientific discovery has ever been made except by those who kneel in wonder before the mystery of creation. Wonder is a subjective feeling. Even if you turn outward, you wind up confronting yourself—a blazing galaxy is wondrous only because human eyes are gazing upon it, and the need to understand our wonder is a human need.
Earlier I quoted an old guru who said that the best way to meet God is to admire his (or her) creation so intensely that the Creator comes out of hiding to meet you. This is rather like an artist who hears about someone who loves his paintings with unbounded enthusiasm. What artist could resist meeting such an admirer? There’s a trick to this simple fable, of course, because anyone who has explored Creation to the point of going beyond light and shadow, good and evil, inner and outer, has connected with God already. At that point you and your creator share the same love. Then the only answer to “Who made me?” is “I made myself.”
We can allow for the howls of outrage from those who read blasphemy in the idea that human beings created themselves. But no one is usurping God’s privileges. The level at which we create ourselves is the level of the soul. The soul is your sacred body. It is the junction point between infinity and the relative world. In that regard I disagree with Einstein. I don’t think human awareness must stand in awe before infinity. The thinking mind may be forced to do that, but where thinking fails, consciousness is free to go on. Thinking never invented love, desire, art, music, kindness, altruism, intuition, wisdom, and passion—in fact, all the things that make life worthwhile. When the thinking mind halts in awe before God’s creation, love has light-years yet to go; desire still reaches out for more. The process of reinventing the body and resurrecting the soul is a journey, and the journey never ends.
Acknowledgments
In this book I wanted the reader to grasp that life is a process That truth sinks in when a book is being produced. The process needs an astute and sympathetic editor like Peter Guzzardi, who knows how to steer errant chapters back on the right track. In many ways he is the silent author of the final manuscript. This book crucially needed the supportive environment provided at the publisher’s by Shaye Areheart and Jenny Frost. Without their belief in the printed word, my writing would never be allowed to serve a higher purpose. Just as necessary are the people who tend to the details of production and who make an author’s life easier from day to day—in this case, Tara Gilbride, Kira Walton, and Julia Pastore.
Thanks to all of you, and as always to Carolyn Rangel, the trusted right hand who always knows what the left hand is doing.
About the Author
Deepak Chopra is the author of more than fifty books translated into over thirty-five languages, including numerous New York Time bestsellers in both the fiction and nonfiction categories.
Visit him at www.DeepakChopra.com.
Copyright
© 2009 by Deepak Chopra
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Harmony Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
Harmony Books is a registered trademark and the Harmony Books colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request
eISBN: 978-0-307-45234-4
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