By Deepak Chopra, M.D., FACP, P. Murali Doraiswamy, MBBS, FRCP, Professor of Psychiatry, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina, Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D., Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology at Harvard University, and Director of the Genetics and Aging Research Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Neil Theise, MD, Professor, Pathology and Medicine, (Division of Digestive Diseases) Beth Israel Medical Center — Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, Menas C. Kafatos, Ph.D., Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor in Computational Physics, Chapman University<\/p>\n
We promised at the outset to explain the nature of reality by going to its very heart. To all appearances reality is dual. The objective world exists \u201cout there\u201d to be measured, but its existence is known only through subjective experience, which is \u201cin here.\u201d\u00a0 Both worlds need each other, and to be trapped in only one is unsatisfactory. The world turns into a dream only if you are conscious of your inner feelings, moods, sensations, and images. Yet if you rely only upon the physical world, you may wind up with meaningless data that don\u2019t provide any link to what is truly important in everyday life.\u00a0 This point is easy enough to see, but joining the two worlds into wholeness isn\u2019t easy.<\/p>\n
Indeed, the task is so difficult that science proceeds as if it can exclude the mysterious, unreliable world \u201cin here,\u201d preferring measures of reality that can be reduced to quantifiable numbers.\u00a0 As a result, all of us have become used to balancing two versions of reality, and we do it almost without thinking. A summer day can be 90 degrees Fahrenheit, which is a fact, or it can be warm, which is a sensation. The two are not synonymous. \u201cWarm\u201d is a purely subjective statement, and it has no correlation to the thermometer. (After a subzero winter in Antarctica, 32 degrees F. feels warm, whereas compared to the inside of a volcano, 90 degrees F. is cool.)<\/p>\n
Is there a way to join these two halves of reality?\u00a0 Most people aren\u2019t concerned with such a question, but we posit that wholeness – seeing reality exactly for what it is – would set the human mind, and human life itself, free. The cosmos is a cold prison measured as meaningless data extracted from random events. To be human is to crave meaning, and yet intellectual honesty compels us not to accept easy answers. It is too easy, for example, to say that God created the universe, and since God loves us, the universe is our loving home. Such answers once sufficed, but four hundred years of scientific theories and data to back them up have swamped us.\u00a0 Overwhelmed by facts about the world \u201cout there,\u201d it is a struggle to give the world \u201cin here\u201d the validity it deserves.<\/p>\n
Our trek to wholeness, as outlined in the first two posts, involves the quantum principle of complementarity, whose purpose is to make some of Nature\u2019s seeming paradoxes compatible. (Please refer to the previous posts to see how this repair job on duality works.) Essentially, complementarity holds that opposites need each other – they cannot be complete in themselves without the other \u201chalf\u201d. The classic example is the opposition of particle and wave, which look and act totally different but which are the inescapable reality of quanta.\u00a0 Complementarity is critical because it asserts that there is only one reality, and no matter how much it shifts its shape as we look from different perspectives, all the angles from which reality can be seen must ultimately fit together. This is comparable to all the tourist photos taken of the Grand Canyon. No matter how many there are, what time of day or night when they were taken, and irrespective of the million aspects of the canyon that were chosen, the whole collection of photos can\u2019t depict different Grand Canyons – there is only one in the first place.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, things aren\u2019t this simple when we substitute \u201creality\u201d for \u201cGrand Canyon,\u201d because from the perspective of \u201cin here\u201d there is no proof that the external world exists independently of conscious awareness. At the same time, using only scientific data gathered \u201cout there,\u201d there is no proof of the subjective world, either. An MRI scan can show the brain centers for pain lighting up, yet if you ask someone \u201cHow much does your arthritis hurt today?\u201d only their subjective report is valid.\u00a0 Even consciousness itself is only inferred by watching the brain light up.\u00a0 A brain scan is actually a very complicated version of those cartoons where a light bulb goes off when somebody, usually an egghead professor, has a bright idea. The light bulb can\u2019t tell you what the bright idea actually is, and neither can an MRI.<\/p>\n
Thus in order to see reality as a whole, we have to ask something incredibly basic: Why did creation split into subject and object in the first place? They are so wildly incompatible that this split has dogged and troubled humankind for centuries. Couldn\u2019t God or the multiverse or random chance have come up with something much simpler, a reality that holds together properly? It doesn\u2019t seem all that much to ask.<\/p>\n
The two worlds \u201cin here\u201d and \u201cout there\u201d are either split for a reason or it just happened that way.\u00a0 If it just happened that way, fine.\u00a0 Science will go on, and so will subjective experience, and the two will uneasily meet somewhere in the brain. But if \u201cin here\u201d and \u201cout there\u201d are split for a reason, that\u2019s a new story.\u00a0 There have been many versions of the story so far. In many cultures, there was once a Golden Age that was innocent, pure, and untroubled (in other words, whole) while now we live in a fallen age, and our separation from God or the gods has resulted in a fragmented world.\u00a0 Good is forced to come to terms with its opposite, evil, and therefore a reality of light and darkness envelops us. Needless, to say, such a story has not been satisfactory in a rational, scientific age.\u00a0 It persists as myth and religion, which billions of people still prefer to science.<\/p>\n
We come closer to a rational story via complementarity, because when complementarity holds that opposites have a hidden unity at the limit of observation (revealed through mathematics), a complete view of quantum physics is satisfied.\u00a0 An opposite\u00a0pair light wave and particle arise from the same source, and even if this source is beyond the five senses, lying in some invisible virtual domain, quantum mechanics can link the opposites and thus make every measurement turn out right.\u00a0 By extension, can we say the same about \u201cin here\u201d and \u201cout there\u201d? Do they spring from a common source?<\/p>\n
Our answer is yes, and we point to the only source that could unite them, which is consciousness.\u00a0\u00a0 The universal model for any experience needs three parts, commonly called the observer, the observed, and the process of observation. \u201cNewton saw an apple\u201d fits this model, as does \u201cthe collapse of the wave function produces a particle.\u201d\u00a0 In the first case, the observer is named – Newton. In the second, the observer is implied. A great many physicists would balk, however, claiming that the collapse of the wave function doesn\u2019t need an observer. It can happen even with automated experiments that carry out observations of the quantum system. It\u2019s an objective event that occurs trillions of times throughout the cosmos, like countless other events (colliding hydrogen atoms, exploding stars, protons getting sucked into black holes) that came along before observers ever existed.<\/p>\n
But this argument, which seems so common-sensical, is fallacious.\u00a0 The principle of complementarity tells us that \u201cin here\u201d and \u201cout there\u201d aren\u2019t just compatible; they are necessary to each other, intertwined aspects of the whole. You can\u2019t have one without the other.\u00a0 Grasping this fact is hard. Classical Western science, from the ancient Greeks through Newton and beyond, was based on atoms, molecules, and other physical \u201cstuff\u201d that exists on its own.\u00a0 But just as there cannot be particles without waves; \u201cout there\u201d needs consciousness, \u201cin here.\u201d This is a participatory universe, and leaving the participant out cannot be valid. In a fundamental sense, the universe is human, because we aren\u2019t just isolated observers like kids pressing their noses to the window of a bakery shop. The three-part model needs all three parts: observer, observed, and process of observation.<\/p>\n
Many thinkers have tried to wriggle out of this apparent trap, but without success.\u00a0 Our position is that their denial serves only to keep the human mind encaged, creating further and further problems for our collective and individual selves. We entitled this series of posts \u201cCan Reality Set Us Free?\u201d to underscore that by its very nature, the human mind is not limited, not even by its own short-sighted concepts. Boundaries and edges, the things that separate one thing from another, are always conceptual, manmade.\u00a0 Where does your body stop?\u00a0 From the everyday level of scale, your boundary is your skin.\u00a0 From the atomic level of scale you and the planet are linked – every atom in your body comes from water, earth, and air taken in from the planet.\u00a0 From this perspective, human beings don\u2019t liver\u00a0on<\/i>\u00a0the planet, we\u00a0are<\/i>\u00a0the planet. Reality itself is a seamless flowing process where all phenomena are linked.\u00a0 There are no actual boundaries.<\/p>\n
Likewise, what we call an event constitutes another manmade boundary. The universe is constantly bubbling at the quantum level. Where we live, this bubbling looks linear as event A leads to event B, what we call A causes B. However, at finer levels of bubbling, time emerges, which means that below that level, getting very near the source, the bubbles aren\u2019t occurring in the realm of time.<\/p>\n
But the most liberating boundary that anyone can break free of is the one that encircles the mind, like a fence around a corral, so that there is \u201cmy\u201d mind and \u201cyour\u201d mind (like two different horses inside the corral), and using a bigger fence, the \u201chuman\u201d mind, which is so self-enclosed that outside the corral there is \u201cno\u201d mind.\u00a0\u00a0 Several of the quantum pioneers, such as Planck and Schr\u00f6dinger, had enough clarity to see that this boundary, too, is manmade.\u00a0 There is only one consciousness, in fact, and it must be basic to creation.<\/p>\n
Reality, then, is boundless, immeasurable, and conscious. It cannot be otherwise if the three-part model and complementarity are correct, which has been demonstrated over and over.\u00a0 This is more than finicky wrangling among philosophers. The tracks of consciousness are apparent throughout creation, and what is more, when they appear, these tracks link up in analogous ways. It\u2019s our position that the self-organizing nature of the universe is the most fundamental manifestation of consciousness (for more on these themes, see\u00a0video by co-author Neil Theise<\/a>.<\/p>\n In biology, it is undeniable that living things organize themselves, using DNA as the basic template. Adult horses create baby horses; horse livers create new liver cells; each cell sustains the process of eating, breathing, excreting, dividing, and so on. This self-organization depends on interacting with the environment using feedback loops that constantly promote survival. Being adaptable to their surroundings, horses can survive high in Montana or below sea level in Death Valley.\u00a0 A horse can run or stand still. It can be pregnant or not. These are massive changes of state, but the horse\u2019s body adapts, all the way from the cellular to the molecular level. If a condition arises that makes adaptation impossible, such as a total absence of drinking water, the animal dies. It is quite astonishing how self-organization and feedback loops maintain balance at every level from biomolecules up through each cell, tissue, and organ to create the entire body.<\/p>\n The crucial factor here is allowing for order while keeping randomness in check. At every level of Nature there is always a limited degree of randomness when an orderly structure, from the atom to a full-gown Arabian stallion, interacts with its surroundings.\u00a0 Too much and there is no self-organization, just disorder.\u00a0 Too little, and the self-organization can\u2019t change pattern to adapt when the environment changes.\u00a0 In other words, if a horse had only a fixed slow heartbeat, it couldn\u2019t run, and if its heart raced uncontrollably, it would drop dead.\u00a0 But in a defined zone of \u201cquenched disorder,\u201d creative adaptations can take place, bubbling into existence and disappearing if adaptation is not required.<\/p>\n If we scrutinize a horse at various levels, we see atoms, molecules, cells, tissues, organs, and finally the complete creature. But so far as Nature is concerned, there is only endless adaptation as one level retains its own integrity while meshing into the next level.\u00a0 Complementarity in biology is thus the relationship between each of these levels. Choosing one perspective excludes all others at the time of observation. Choose to look at the body at the everyday level, and you can\u2019t see the cells.\u00a0 Go down to the molecular level, and cells vanish from view.\u00a0 But it is the sum of all these levels that are your body.<\/p>\n This dynamic stream of cooperation is the modern equivalent of the religious notion of the Great Chain of Being.\u00a0 That notion held that God seamlessly united every level of creation. In non-religious terms, we say that complex systems have organized themselves and then merge into even greater degrees of complexity. The fact that increasingly denser amounts of information can be so elegantly ordered from complex molecules to the human brain implies a mind that pervades the universe. It exists as never-ending feedback loops that provide balance, growth, and adaptability.<\/p>\n With this scheme in mind, it is possible to arrive at a meaningful universe.\u00a0 The attributes that we call human, actually pervade creation. Besides self-organization, there is evolution and unexpected creative leaps.\u00a0 We possess them because we are of the universe, not because we are particularly special and separate within the universe.<\/p>\n Our viewpoint isn\u2019t likely to be persuasive to scientists who restrict themselves to reductionism, which by its nature examines only isolated segments of complex systems. But it\u2019s one thing to study the function of the kidney or lung and quite another to claim that the rest of the body doesn\u2019t count.\u00a0 The part cannot make a greater claim to reality than the whole. We live in fortunate times. The separate researches of countless scientists have arrived at such a sophisticated level that the interaction of complex systems has given rise to theories of complexity, and on the horizon there looms a General Theory of Complexity.\u00a0 We don\u2019t know if that\u2019s the name such a theory will take. What we do know is that the desire to know the whole of reality isn\u2019t just a human quirk or poetic fancy.\u00a0 That there is only one reality is undeniable. We can choose to remain selective, approaching reality as boxes within boxes. Or we can set ourselves free by throwing out boxes, boundaries, and limitations of all sorts.<\/p>\n As the uniting factor that sets us free, \u201cconsciousness\u201d is a term that is repugnant to many scientists – mostly from an older generation – and mysterious to all.\u00a0 But that doesn\u2019t excuse blindness and neglect.\u00a0 Reality keeps doing its thing, totally conscious of us while we keep evolving to become more conscious of it.\u00a0 That\u2019s been the story for many centuries.\u00a0 Evolution isn\u2019t going to stop; our hope is that it can be sped up, for the good of all.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Deepak Chopra, MD is the author of more than 70 books with twenty-one New York Times bestsellers, including co-author with Sanjiv Chopra, MD of\u00a0Brotherhood: Dharma, Destiny, and The American Dream<\/a>, and co-author with Rudolph Tanzi of\u00a0Super Brain: Unleashing the Explosive Power of Your Mind to Maximize Health, Happiness, and Spiritual Well-being<\/i><\/a>\u00a0<\/i>(Harmony).\u00a0\u00a0<\/i>Chopra serves as Founder of The Chopra Foundation and host of\u00a0Sages and Scientists Symposium<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 August 16-18, 2013 at La Costa Resort and Spa.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n P. Murali Doraiswamy, MBBS, FRCP, Professor of Psychiatry, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina and a leading physician scientist in the area of mental health, cognitive neuroscience and mind-body medicine.<\/p>\n Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D., Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology at Harvard University, and Director of the Genetics and Aging Research Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), co-author with Deepak Chopra of\u00a0Super Brain: Unleashing the Explosive Power of Your Mind to Maximize Health, Happiness, and Spiritual Well-being.<\/i><\/a>\u00a0(Harmony)<\/i><\/p>\n