God: A Story of Revelation (Enlightenment Collection Book 4)

by Deepak Chopra

Every atom fits into a scheme that is innately orderly, not to mention beautiful, intelligent, loving, and all-knowing.

This was the inner journey of Buddha, Jesus, Lao-tzu, Zoroaster, Plato, Rumi, and every other spiritual seeker. For them all, the human mind reflects the divine mind.

Thousands of years before Tagore, the Vedic sages had declared, “The world is as you are.”

There is no separation between what happens “in here”...

The present point in God’s evolution is ambiguous. Every negative trend from the past—a suspicious clergy, rigid dogma, the fight against tolerance—survives alongside positive trends that are just as ancient—a loving Creator, humans made in the image of the divine, direct contact with God’s presence.

The divine speaks silently amid the din of shouting voices, and the miracle is that someone, somewhere, is still willing to listen.

It’s not faith that joins them, but consciousness.

By showing that spiritual practice changes the brain, reality expands. The only reality anyone can know must register in the brain.

You must have a strong intellect and unflagging curiosity. Thinking brings its own joys, but no one would say that this way is blissful.

Yet there are people who cannot stop thinking about God, and knowing the truth about higher reality satisfies them more than devotional bliss can.

Being infinite, God wants nothing; therefore, he

wants nothing from us either.

To reach God, your service must be to life itself, which means serving all beings.

Taking the Baal Shem Tov as our model, we see a humble existence that needs no reward, but derives inspiration from giving.

Devotion begins with a feeling of joy. Understanding begins with a flash of insight. Service begins with an act of humility. But when you begin on the path of meditation, there is only being.

Being doesn’t bring images of fun to mind. It brings nothing to mind so much as a blank. Which turns out to be the secret, because in that seeming blankness lies the beginning of everything. Consciousness is the womb of creation.

Everything you will ever think, say, or do begins here.

On the path of meditation...

your mind to higher conscious...

very es...

Time is no obstacle when your goal is the timeless.

To satisfy science, what we need already exists: the feedback loop. Your body operates through countless chemical messages sent to trillions of cells; these messages create a response that the cells send back to the brain, and depending on what the response is, the next round of messages will change. The brain listens to feedback, and its connection to the rest of the body forms a loop. Now substitute God for the brain and human beings for the body’s cells. The feedback loop remains the same: message and response. If you feel any impulse of joy, hope, beauty, or faith, its source cannot be outside your own awareness.

Divine messages occur within the field of consciousness. If God were outside human awareness, he wouldn’t exist, not for us anyway.

But the infinite and eternal became enclosed in time and space with the big bang, and the same happened to the mind. If the mind of God became limited enough to enter the minds of ordinary people—which is what Job, Plato, St. Paul, and Rumi are all about—that isn’t a miracle. Nothing in the infinite fields of matter, energy, and information that create the visible universe can be known until they are reduced to the human scale.

Some even go so far as seeing spirituality as inherently human—our brains, our genes, and therefore our thoughts are set up to seek God.

Only consciousness can understand consciousness; hence the long tradition of the inner journey. The saints and sages of the past were Einsteins of consciousness, explorers into the nature of reality. They were testing the soul hypothesis, and if these explorers came back with the same findings, century after century, culture after culture, why not give their findings credence?

Their findings are startlingly similar, in fact. The mind, they said, is like a river. On the surface there is constant motion and turbulence; reality can be described as constant change as the river flows through time and space. Just below the surface, however, the river grows slower and calmer. There are no waves, and as you dive deeper, the turbulence on the surface ceases to register.

Stillness prevails, and at the very bottom of the river, if it is deep enough, the water doesn’t move ...

Our connection to God, th...

that between a ...

A river is all one thing, flowing water, yet reality on the surface appears very differen...

We are essentially divine, because God is just another name for the origin and source of consciousness.

We are back to the feedback loop now. If God’s mind is an infinite version of our mind, all our thoughts are movements within the divine mind. Whether you call yourself a believer or an atheist is irrelevant. Consciousness never stops sending messages to itself, waiting for a response, and then adjusting the next round of messages. We possess a soul insofar as we realize that we are part of the feedback loop. The only difference is where you put your attention. Some people are content to remain on the turbulent surface of the river. They are fascinated by the constant activity, the ups and downs; life is a river-rafting trip. But nothing prevents a few people from focusing their attention on another level of consciousness, where calm, peace, wisdom, silence, and the vastness of the cosmic mystery reside.

“Love does not claim possession, but gives freedom.”

Being conscious, we are never away from the divine, even for a second, even during the darkest night of the soul. Somewhere inside, we all yearn to reconnect, and if we sit quietly, during those moments when life’s richness is too overwhelmingly beautiful to ignore, we know that Tagore was profoundly right: