The Book of Secrets - Deepak Chopra [79]
To you, a thought is an image or idea floating through your mind. To the universe—and here we mean the universal intelligence that permeates the swarm of galaxies, black holes, and interstellar dust—a thought is a step in evolution. It’s a creative act. To truly live at the center of the one reality, evolution must become of primary interest to you. The noncritical events in your life already run themselves. Think of your body, which operates with two separate types of nervous system. The involuntary nervous system is automatic—it regulates the everyday functions of the body without intervention from you. When someone goes into a coma, this nervous system continues more or less normally, keeping heartbeat, blood pressure, hormones, electrolytes, and a hundred other functions going in perfect coordination.
The other nervous system is called voluntary because it relates to will, or volition. The voluntary nervous system carries out desires. That is its only purpose, and without it, life would run exactly as it does for someone in a coma, without any motion forward, frozen in a waking death.
The universe reflects the same division. On one level, natural forces need no assistance from us to keep everything regulated so that life can be sustained. Ecology is self-balancing. Plants and animals exist in harmony without knowing that they do. One could imagine a world in which nothing expands beyond basic existence, where instead creatures are reduced to eating, breathing, and sleeping. Such a world doesn’t exist, however. Even one-celled amoebas swim in a particular direction, hunt for food, move toward light, and seek temperatures they prefer. Desire is built into the scheme of life.
So it’s not that incredible to look for the second half of the universe’s nervous system, the half that revolves around desire. When your brain carries out a desire, the universe is carrying it out at the same time. There is no difference between “I want to have a child” and “The universe wants to have a child.” The embryo that starts to grow in the womb relies on billions of years of intelligence, memory, creativity, and evolution. The individual seamlessly flows into the cosmos when we are talking about fetuses in the womb. Why should this merging stop there? The fact that you experience your desire as individual doesn’t negate the universe from acting through you, just as the fact that you consider your children to be yours doesn’t negate the fact that they are also the children of a vast gene pool. That gene pool has no other parent than the universe.
At this moment, you are seamlessly flowing with the cosmos. There is no difference between your breathing and the breathing of the rain forest, between your bloodstream and the world’s rivers, between your bones and the chalk cliffs of Dover. Every shift in the ecosystem has affected you at the level of your genes. The universe remembers its evolution by leaving a record written in DNA. This means that your genes are the focal point for everything happening in the world. They are your line of communication with nature as a whole, not just with your mother and father.
Set aside what you have read about DNA as a string of sugars and amino acids strung in a double helix. That model tells us what DNA looks like, but it says almost nothing about what is actually going on in the dynamics of life, just as the wiring diagram of a television tells us nothing about what