The Book of Secrets - Deepak Chopra [97]
The human body runs on dual controls. If you heal it from the outside by material means, it will respond. If you heal it from the inside by subjective means, it will also respond. How can it be that talking about your feelings can have as much effect as a powerful cancer drug (or even more)? The answer is that consciousness always takes these two roads. It unfolds objectively as the visible universe and subjectively as events inside the mind. Both are the same consciousness. The same intelligence has put on two masks, differentiating into the world “out there” and the one “in here.” So the wisps of feeling that arise in a cancer patient communicate with the body much like the molecules of a drug.
This phenomenon isn’t remarkable anymore—all of mind-body medicine is based on the discovery of messenger molecules that begin in the brain as thoughts, beliefs, wishes, fears, and desires. The breakthrough will come when medicine stops giving all the credit to molecules. When Mozart wanted to compose a new symphony, his intention called up the necessary brain function. It would be absurd to say that Mozart’s brain wanted to write a symphony first and produced messenger molecules to inform him of the fact. Awareness always comes first, and its projections, both objective and subjective, follow.
This brings us to a new principle that is crucially important, called “simultaneous interdependent co-arising.” Simultaneous because one thing doesn’t cause another. Interdependent because each aspect is coordinated with every other. Co-arising because every separate part comes from the same source.
When Mozart wanted to compose a symphony, everything associated with his creation happened simultaneously: the idea, the notes, the sound in his head, the necessary brain activity, the signals to his hands as they wrote the music down. All these ingredients were organized into one experience, and they arose together. It would be false to say that one caused the other.
If one element should fall out of place, the whole project would collapse. Should Mozart get depressed, his emotional state will block the music. Should he get physically exhausted, fatigue will block the music. One can think of a hundred ways that disorder could disrupt the picture: Mozart could have had marital problems, a stroke or heart attack, a sudden artistic block, or the noisy distraction of a two-year-old in the house.
Creation is kept from anarchy by simultaneous co-arising.
The cosmos matches the human mind far too closely to ignore. It’s as if the universe were putting on its mind-boggling show of galaxies exploding from nothingness only to tease us. It makes no sense that a process spanning billions of light years and expanding with unbelievable speed to generate trillions of stars should climax with the appearance of human DNA. Why did the universe need us to look on in wonder? Perhaps it’s because reality just works that way: The unfolding cosmic drama exists simultaneously with the human brain, an instrument so finely attuned that it can delve into any level of nature. We are the ultimate audience. Nothing gets past us, no matter how minuscule or vast.
Now an extraordinary answer is beginning to dawn: Maybe we are putting on the whole show ourselves. The meaning of life is everything because we demand nothing less than the universe as our playground.
Quantum physics long ago conceded that the observer is the deciding factor in every observation. An electron has no fixed position in space until someone looks for it, and then the electron pops up precisely where it was looked for. Until that moment, it only exists as a wave propagating everywhere through space. That wave could collapse into a particle anywhere. Every single atom in the universe has a minute probability of being located as far away as possible or as near as possible.