The Book of Secrets - Deepak Chopra [7]
Yes No When air molecules cause your eardrum to quiver no differently from a cymbal being hit with a stick, you hear a voice that you recognize speaking words you understand.
Yes No On their own, sodium and chlorine are deadly poisons. When they combine as salt, they form the most basic chemical in support of life.
Yes No To read this sentence, several million neurons in your cerebral cortex had to form an instantaneous pattern that is completely original and never appeared before in your life.
There is no grade for this exercise, but keep it at hand until you finish this book. Then return to see if your beliefs have changed enough that you can give an explanation based on the spiritual secrets being discussed.
Secret #2
THE WORLD IS IN YOU
TO SOLVE THE MYSTERY OF LIFE requires only one commandment: Live like a cell. But we don’t, and the reason is not hard to find. We have our own way of doing things. Our cells are fueled by the same oxygen and glucose that fueled amoebas two billion years ago, but we are attracted by high-fat, sugary, more or less frivolous fad foods. Our cells cooperate with each other along the same lines set down by evolution in tree ferns of the Cretaceous period, but we find a new enemy somewhere in the world every decade, perhaps every year or month. We all have a similar tale to tell of deviations from the precise, complete, and almost perfect wisdom that our bodies follow.
Our wayward lapses point to a much larger pattern. To get back to the cell’s wisdom, each of us needs to see that we are living the aftereffects of someone else’s old choices. We were taught to follow a set of habits and beliefs that totally disregard the mystery of life. These beliefs are contained one inside the other like nested boxes:
There is a material world.
The material world is full of things, events, and people.
I am one of those people, and my status is no higher than that of anyone else.
To find out who I am, I must explore the material world.
This set of beliefs is binding. It allows no room for soul-searching, or even for the soul itself. Why bring the mystery of life into a system that already knows what is real? But as convincing as the material world looks, to the great embarrassment of modern science, no one has been able to prove that it is real. Ordinary people don’t focus on science, so this glaring problem is not well known. Yet any neurologist will assure you that the brain offers no proof that the outside world really exists and many hints that it doesn’t.
All the brain does, in fact, is to receive continuous signals about the body’s state of chemical balance, temperature, and oxygen consumption, along with a crackling stream of nerve impulses. This mass of raw data starts out as chemical bursts with attached electrical charges. These blips run up and down a tangled web of spidery nerve cells, and once a signal reaches the brain, like a runner from the edge of the Empire bringing a message to Rome, the cortex assembles the raw data into even more complex arrangements of electrical and chemical blips.
The cortex doesn’t inform us about this never-ending data processing, which is all that is happening inside gray matter. Instead, the cortex tells us about the world—it allows us to perceive sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and textures—the whole array of creation. The brain has pulled an enormous trick on us, a remarkable sleight of hand, because there is no direct connection between the body’s raw data and our subjective sense of an outside world.
For all anyone knows, the entire outside world could be a dream. When I’m in bed having a dream, I see a world of events just as vivid as the waking world (for most of us, the other four senses are scattered unevenly throughout our dreams, but some dreamers can touch, taste, hear, and smell as accurately as they can while awake). But when I open my eyes in the morning, I know that these vivid events were all produced inside my head. I’d never make