Awareness: Maker of Reality By Deepak Chopra, MD

In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard writes eloquently about an entire class of people, those born blind, who do not live in a world that contains space, size, distance, or many other qualities we accept as given. Several decades ago, when eye surgeons first learned to remove cataracts safely, they could restore sight overnight to people who had been blind from birth. Suddenly released into the light, the newly sighted did not feel freed. They were plunged into a mystery that was at times overwhelming. "The vast majority of patients, of both sexes and all ages, had . . . no idea of space whatsoever," Dillard writes, drawing from the notes left by surgeons. "Form, distance, and size were so many meaningless syllables. One patient 'had no idea of depth, confusing it with roundness.'

"Of another postoperative patient the doctor writes, 'I have found in her no notion of size, for example, not even within the narrow limits she might have encompassed with the aid of touch. Thus when I asked her to show me how big her mother was, she did not stretch out her hands, but set her two index fingers a few inches apart.'"

One patient was used to telling the difference between a cube and a sphere by touching both to his tongue. After the operation, he looked at the same objects and could not tell them apart by sight. A second patient said that lemonade was "square" because it gave his tongue a pricking sensation, the same way a square object gave his hands a pricking sensation.

The newly sighted faced a baffling world because they lacked the visual creativity we all take for granted. Vision was plopped into their laps formlessly, which is how it really exists before the mind turns it into something formed.

"For the newly sighted," Dillard comments, "vision is pure sensation unencumbered by meaning." Adding the meaning proved too much for some of them. They reverted to closing their eyes when they were alone, feeling objects with their hands and tongues, or climbing the stairs with eyes shut to avoid the dizzying prospect of going straight up a wall. Poignantly, the glut of visual images caused almost every person to lose the serenity that is so striking in those born blind. . . . Just because we are so used to the usual construct of the world, that does not mean it must already exist. Other people may not accept our code for reality if they do not accept our code for seeing. The eye refuses to see what the mind does not know.

I am reminded of stories told about Turks who ran in panic from the theater when they saw their first movie, thinking that the image of a locomotive was leaping out of the wall; of forest pygmies in Africa who were led onto a plain for the first time and thought that distant water buffaloes were actually two inches high; of Eskimos who were confronted with photographs of themselves and saw no faces at all, only a jumble of gray and black blotches. These are not "primitive" responses but responses from another code, another world.

Yet every person accepts some code. The human race is bound in cords of sight, with only the rishis [sages] to tell us that we are free to adopt any code we wish.

Weaving the Fabric of Awareness

The reason the rishis were able to see this so clearly is that their own experience of the world was beyond the binding influence of any single code of perception. They did not select bits and pieces from the field but saw it as a whole. And what did this wholeness look like? When the rishis turned their attention toward the field, to see its totality, they found that the field was pure awareness, the same "mind-stuff" that fills our heads.

"Pure" means without form and can be equated with the motionless silence being contacted in meditation. Existing without form in the field, pure awareness starts to vibrate and in so doing turns itself into the visible universe.

A thought can be seen as a vibration inside this mind-stuff, and so can an atom, although an atom is outside our heads and has all the marks of matter. These marks are only trick effects, the rishis declared. Atoms, molecules, photons of light, stars, galaxies-all of creation-are fashioned from the same thing, pure awareness.

This, the core insight of ancient India, is too sweeping to take on faith, and it can only be tested in a higher state of consciousness. However, we have a linking concept, the field, which can at least take us to the boundary of the rishis' world.

Over the last fifty years, the concept of the field rose to prominence in physics when it was realized that matter and energy have no fixed, concrete existence. Because you can hold a tennis ball in your hand, common sense tells you that you must be able to hold the smallest part of a tennis ball in your hand, too. But the elementary particles that are the smallest bits of matter are not solid or fixed.

To see a tennis ball accurately, one has to imagine it being like a swarm of bees. Each bee is flying so fast that it forms a streak of light, like a sparkler waved around in the dark on the Fourth of July. Besides leaving a visible trail, each bee also leaves a trail you can feel. Thus, even though the bee moves out of sight as soon as you try to spot it, your eyes and hands still see and feel where it has been. . . .

In essence a field is only but a set of variables to be measured. One can probe it for the various sorts of trails that the whizzing particles are leaving in their wake. When that is done, what comes out is a highly precise, scientifically useful set of descriptions. A quark [for example] can be described as having this or that property-mass, momentum, symmetry, spin-all of which can be computed with beautiful mathematical accuracy. Strangely, one can know everything about the flying bee without ever stopping it. That is why a tennis ball seems totally secure, solid, and real on one level, where the senses operate, and totally ghostly and unreal at a deeper level, where the senses cannot go.

Like a rishi, a physicist maneuvers between existing things, possible things, and nothing. Lord Krishna can use the word "field" with the same intent as a physicist: Both are trying to convey a sense of nature's wholeness. . . .

Mistake of the Intellect

I have dwelt on the parallels between Vedic thought and modern physics because there has been a great deal of past misunderstanding in this area. It became fashionable in the late seventies to claim that quantum theory was anticipated by the insights of mystics, principally the sages of Buddhism and Taoism. Many people took this to mean that Eastern wisdom could be interpreted in terms of modern physics, and vice versa. Hope arose that a bridge would be built between East and West, and through a mingling of insights, both worldviews would profit.

Very soon, however, there came a backlash from professional physicists, among others, decrying the whole notion. To them, the quantum field is a hard fact, while a mystic's visions are at the extreme of softness. It was argued that the complex and highly specialized mathematics which predicts the behavior of such things as quarks and leptons has little or nothing to do with human behavior. To suggest that the mind has a quantum basis was fantasy, since thoughts and subatomic particles exist in totally separate realms. These could not be bridged by physics, nor did most physicists even wish to try. (Although they kept quieter about it, traditional Buddhists were equally dismayed, since they saw their religion as centered on the salvation of soul mired in the cycle of rebirth. They did not see the relevance of quantum theory to this goal, and therefore their desire to build a bridge was minimal, as well.)

I hope I will not simply make matters worse by pointing out that to discuss the ancient sages in terms of either mysticism or quantum theory deprives them of their true originality and purpose. The Vedic seers, like their later counterparts in Taoism and Buddhism, were not mystics; they were wide-awake observers of the same world we all live in. They did not deal solely in subjective visions and insights; their minds were focused on the junction-point where subjectivity and objectivity meet. This gave them a unique perspective from which to observe their own consciousness as it transformed itself into the rocks, trees, mountains, and stars we all perceive "out there".

I have done my best to provide convincing proof that reality is everyone's personal creation. People will never grasp this solely on an intellectual levelit must be experienced and internalized. The intellect, by raising barriers of doubt, denial, and fear, has reduced direct spiritual experience to an empty mysticism, making it much harder for people to realize how necessary such experience actually is. If I can take the risk of defining it, a spiritual experience is one in which pure awareness reveals itself as the maker of reality. What could be more relevant to our lives? Reality is pouring from us like dreams from a dreamer or light from a bonfire. Once we gain control over this process, we can restore ourselves to a state of freedom and fulfillment; in other words, we can put ourselves back in paradise.

The loss of spiritual experience, in both East and West, has shattered the higher aspirations of human life. "All your suffering is rooted in one superstition," a guru told his disciples. "You believe that you live in the world, when in fact the world lives in you." The ancient rishis went even further and declared that perfection in every area of life was sacrificed because of Pragya-Paradha, "the mistake of the intellect".

The intellect's need to explore the world, which began in the remote past and reached its peak in modern times, eventually took us so far into the diversity of creation that the source of our creation-our own awareness-was lost sight of. Inner experiences of bliss and infinite expansion, of complete freedom and boundless power, became "mystical". No one has such experiences as a matter of course; indeed, it seems to take years of meditation to get back to the state of awareness where these experiences become remotely possible. By now, the hard reality "out there" has become so compelling that spirit is allowed little if any power at all. Perhaps the existence of spirit was a superstition all along.

As dismal as it may sound, the current state of spiritual atrophy does not have to become permanent; the "mistake of the intellect" can be corrected. In fact, there is cause for tremendous optimism here. To narrow our problems down to a single cause is a breakthrough in and of itself. How then do we correct our mistake? Not by giving up the intellect altogether, which would only result in mindlessness. The intellect must be restored to its proper place in the total balance of awareness. Repeated experience of pure awareness allows this healing to take place.

When all its aspects are in balance, human awareness finds itself living both halves of life, the absolute state of the Self and the relative state of the self. By remaining in contact with our core of pure aware-ness, we can fully appreciate the beautiful and diverse world "out there". The mirror of nature will give us back the reflection of our own inner joy. The poet W. B. Yeats wrote, "We are happy when for every-thing inside us there is a corresponding something outside us." The word "correspondence" means a flow of communication as well as a similarity between two things. When awareness is completely balanced, communicating with the outside world is instantaneous and automatic. It happens with the touch of thought.