The Book of Secrets - Deepak Chopra [46]
These ten principles arguably represent ways to conceive of the operating system that keeps one reality going. In truth, the whole thing is inconceivable, and our brains aren’t set up to operate on inconceivable lines. They can adapt, however, to living unconsciously. Every creature on earth is subject to the laws of nature; only humans think, “What does all this matter to me?” If you opt out and decide to live as if duality is real, you won’t see that these ten principles have any bearing on you. The cosmic joke is that the same laws will continue to uphold your life even though you don’t recognize them.
The choice is to be conscious or not, which brings us to the possibility for transformation. No one disputes the fact that life consists of change. But can a person, simply by altering his or her consciousness, actually bring about a deep transformation and not just another superficial change? Transformation and change are two different things, as can be seen in any fairy tale. The poor girl left by her wicked stepmother to scrub the fireplace while her stepsisters go to the ball doesn’t improve herself by attending night school. Cinderella is touched by a magic wand and whisked off to the palace as a completed, transformed creature.
In fairy tale logic, change is too slow, too gradual, too mundane to satisfy the yearning symbolized by the frog who knows he is a prince or the ugly duckling who becomes the beautiful swan. There’s more than an element of fantasy in a magic touch that will instantaneously deliver a trouble-free life. More important, this fantasy disguises the way true transformation takes place.
The key to true transformation is that nature doesn’t move forward in step-by-step movements. It takes quantum leaps all the time, and when it does, old ingredients aren’t simply recombined. Something new appears in creation for the first time, an emergent property. For example, if you examine hydrogen and oxygen, they are light, gaseous, invisible, and dry. It took a transformation for those two elements to combine and create water, and when that happened, an entirely new set of possibilities emerged with it, the most important from our point of view being life itself.
The wetness of water is a perfect example of an emergent property. In a universe without water, wetness can’t be derived by shuffling around properties that already exist. Shuffling only produces change; it isn’t sufficient for transformation. Wetness had to emerge as something completely new in creation. Once you look closely enough, it turns out that every chemical bond produces an emergent property. (I gave the example in passing of sodium and chlorine—two poisons that when combined produce salt, another basic element of life.) Your body, which is bonding millions of molecules every second, depends on transformation. Breathing and digestion, to mention just two processes, harness transformation. Food and air aren’t just shuffled around but, rather, undergo the exact chemical bonding needed to keep you alive. The sugar extracted from an orange travels to the brain and fuels a thought. The emergent property in this case is the newness of the thought: No molecules in the history of the universe ever combined to produce that result. Air entering your lungs combines in thousands of ways to produce cells that have never existed before in just the way they exist in you, and when you use oxygen to move, your muscles are performing actions that, however they may be similar to those of other people, are unique expressions of you.
If transformation is the norm, then spiritual transformation falls into place as an extension of where life has been going all along. While still remaining who you are, you can bring about a quantum leap in your awareness,