Dr. D. Chopra´s SynchroDestiny

Book extract: Synchrodestiny
by Deepak Chopra

1: Matter, Mind, and Spirits

From the moment we become aware of the world around us, we begin to
wonder about our place within it. The questions we ask are timeless:
Why am I here? How do I fit into the scheme of things? What is my
destiny? As children, we tend to think of the future as a clean sheet
of paper upon which we can write our own stories. The possibilities
seem endless, and we are energized by the promise of discovery and the
sheer pleasure of living immersed in so much potential. But as we grow
up, become adults, and are "educated" about our limitations, our view
of the future becomes constricted. What once lifted our imaginations
now weighs us down with dread and anxiety. What once felt boundless
becomes narrow and dark.

There is a way to regain the soaring joy of unlimited potential. All
that is required is an understanding of the true nature of reality, a
willingness to recognize the interrelatedness and inseparability of
all things. Then, aided by specific techniques, you will find the
world opening up to you, and the good luck and opportunities that
popped up every once in a while will occur more and more frequently.
How powerful is synchrodestiny? Imagine for a moment that you find
yourself with a flashlight in your hand in a room that is totally
dark. You turn on the flashlight and see a beautiful painting hanging
on the wall. You might think, "Sure, this is a wonderful work of art,
but is this all there is?" Then, all at once, the room becomes
illuminated from above. You look around and see that you are in an art
museum, with hundreds of paintings on the walls around you, each more
beautiful than the last. As these possibilities stand revealed to you,
you realize you have a lifetime of art to study and love. You are no
longer constrained to view just one painting lit by the weak glow of
your flashlight.

This is the promise of synchrodestiny. It turns on the lights. It
gives us the ability to make real decisions instead of blind guesses
as we move forward in our lives. It allows us to see meaning in the
world, to understand the connectedness or synchronicity of all things,
to choose the kind of life we want to live, and to fulfill our
spiritual journey. With synchrodestiny, we gain the ability to
transform our lives according to our intentions.

The first step to living this way is to understand the nature of the
three levels of existence.

Level 1:

THE PHYSICAL DOMAIN

The first level of existence is physical or material, the visible
universe. This is the world we know best, what we call the real world.
It contains matter and objects with firm boundaries, everything that
is three-dimensional, and it includes everything we experience with
our five senses-all that we can see, hear, feel, taste, or smell. It
includes our bodies, the wind, the earth, water, gases, animals,
microbes, molecules, and the pages of this book. In the physical
domain time seems to flow in a line so straight that we call it the
arrow of time, from the past to the present to the future. This means
that everything in the physical domain has a beginning, a middle, and
an end, and is therefore impermanent. Sentient beings are born and
die. Mountains soar from the molten core of the earth and are brought
low again by the relentless scouring of rain and wind.

The physical world as we experience it is governed by immutable laws
of cause and effect, so that everything is predictable. Newtonian
physics allows us to predict action and reaction, so that when
billiard balls hit each other with a particular speed and at a
particular angle, we can anticipate exactly what route each will
travel across the billiards table. Scientists can calculate precisely
when a solar eclipse will occur and how long it will last. All of our
"commonsense" understanding of the world comes from what we know of
this physical domain.

Level 2:

THE QUANTUM DOMAIN

At the second level of existence everything consists of information
and energy. This is called the quantum domain. Everything at this
level is insubstantial, meaning that it cannot be touched or perceived
by any of the five senses. Your mind, your thoughts, your ego, the
part of you that you typically think of as your "self" are all part of
the quantum domain. These things have no solidity, and yet you know
your self and your thoughts to be real. Although it is easiest to
think of the quantum domain in terms of mind, it encompasses much
more. In fact, everything in the visible universe is a manifestation
of the energy and information of the quantum domain. The material
world is a subset of the quantum world.

Another way of stating this is that everything in the physical domain
is made up of information and energy. In Einstein's famous equation, E
= MC2, we learn that energy (E) equals mass (M) times the speed of
light (C) squared. This tells us that matter (mass) and energy are the
same thing only in different forms-energy equals mass.

One of the first science lessons taught in school is that every solid
object is made up of molecules, and molecules are made up of even
smaller units called atoms. We come to understand that this seemingly
solid chair we are sitting on is made up of atoms so small that they
cannot be seen without the aid of a powerful microscope. Later in the
lesson we learn that tiny atoms are made up of subatomic particles,
which have no solidity at all. They are, quite literally, packets or
waves of information and energy. This means that, at this second level
of existence, the chair you are sitting in is nothing but energy and
information.

This concept can be difficult to grasp at first. How can invisible
waves of energy and information be experienced as a solid object? The
answer is that events in the quantum domain occur at the speed of
light, and at that speed our senses simply cannot process everything
that contributes to our perceptual experience. We perceive objects as
being different from one to the next because energy waves contain
different kinds of information, which are determined by the frequency
or vibration of those energy waves. It's like listening to the radio.
A radio tuned to one station, say 101.5 FM, might play only classical
music. Change to a slightly different frequency of radio waves by
tuning in to, say, 101.9 FM, and you might hear only rock and roll.
Energy is coded for different information depending on how it
vibrates.

So the physical world, the world of objects and matter, is made up of
nothing but information contained in energy vibrating at different
frequencies. The reason we don't see the world as a huge web of energy
is that it is vibrating far too fast. Our senses, because they
function so slowly, are able to register only chunks of this energy
and activity, and these clusters of information become "the chair,"
"my body," "water," and every other physical object in the visible
universe.

This is similar to what happens when we watch a movie. As you know, a
motion picture is made up of individual photographic frames with gaps
in between frames. If you looked at a movie film on the reel in a
projection room, you would see the individual frames and gaps. But
when we watch the movie itself, the frames are strung together and
played back so fast that our senses no longer observe the frames as
discontinuous. Instead, we perceive a steady stream of information.

At the quantum level, the various chunks of energy fields vibrating at
different frequencies that we perceive as solid objects are all part
of a collective energy field. If we were capable of perceiving
everything that was happening at the quantum level, we would see that
we are all part of a great "energy soup," and everything-each one of
us and all the objects in the physical domain-is just a cluster of
energy floating in this energy soup. At any given moment your energy
field will come into contact with and affect everyone else's energy
field, and each of us responds in some way to that experience. We are
all expressions of this communal energy and information. Sometimes we
can actually feel this connectedness. This sensation is usually very
subtle, but on occasion it becomes more tangible. Most of us have had
the experience of walking into a room and sensing "tension so thick
you could cut it with a knife," or of being in a church or holy shrine
and being engulfed by a sense of peace. That is the collective energy
of the environment mingling with your own energy, which you register
on some level.

In the physical domain we are also constantly exchanging energy and
information. Imagine that you are standing on the street and you smell
cigarette smoke from someone walking a block away. This means you are
inhaling the breath of that person about one hundred yards away. The
smell is just a tracer notifying you that you are inhaling someone
else's breath. If the tracer wasn't there, if the person walking by
wasn't smoking, you would still be inhaling that person's breath; you
just wouldn't know it without cigarette smoke to alert you. And what
is breath? It is the carbon dioxide and oxygen that come from the
metabolism of every cell in that stranger's body. That is what you are
inhaling, just as other people are inhaling your breath. So we are all
constantly exchanging bits of ourselves-physical, measurable molecules
from our bodies.

At a deeper level, there is really no boundary between our selves and
everything else in the world. When you touch an object, it feels
solid, as though there was a distinct boundary between it and you.
Physicists would say that we experience that boundary as solid because
everything is made up of atoms, and the solidity is the sense of atoms
bumping against atoms. But consider what an atom is. An atom has a
little nucleus with a large cloud of electrons around it. There is no
rigid outer shell, just an electron cloud. To visualize this, imagine
a peanut in the middle of a football stadium. The peanut represents
the nucleus, and the stadium represents the size of the electron cloud
around the nucleus. When we touch an object, we perceive solidity when
the clouds of electrons meet. That is our interpretation of solidity,
given the sensitivity (or relative insensitivity) of our senses. Our
eyes are programmed to see objects as three-dimensional and solid. Our
nerve endings are programmed to feel objects as three-dimensional and
solid. In the reality of the quantum domain, however, there is no
solidity. Is there solidity when two clouds meet? No. They meld and
separate. Something similar happens whenever you touch another object.
Your energy fields (and electron clouds) meet, small portions meld,
and then you separate. Although you perceive yourself to be whole, you
have lost a bit of your energy field to the object, and have gained a
bit of its energy field in return. With every encounter, we exchange
information and energy, and we come away changed just a little bit. In
this way, too, we can see how connected we are to everything else in
the physical world. We are all constantly sharing portions of our
energy fields, so all of us, at this quantum level, at the level of
our minds and our "selves," are all connected. We are all correlated
with one another.

So it is only in our consciousness that our limited senses create a
solid world out of pure energy and information. But what if we could
see into the quantum domain-if we had "quantum eyes"? In the quantum
domain, we would see that everything we think of as solid in the
physical world is actually flickering in and out of an infinite void
at the speed of light. Just like the frame-and-gap sequence of a
motion picture, the universe is an on-off phenomenon. The continuity
and solidity of the world exists only in the imagination, fed by
senses that cannot discern the waves of energy and information that
make up the quantum level of existence. In reality, we are all
flickering in and out of existence all the time. If we could fine-tune
our senses, we could actually see the gaps in our existence. We are
here, and then not here, and then here again. The sense of continuity
is held only by our memories.

There is an analogy that illustrates this point. Scientists know that
it takes a snail about three seconds to register light. So imagine
that a snail was watching me, and that I left the room, robbed a bank,
and came back in three seconds. As far as the snail was concerned, I
never left the room. I could take her to court and she would provide a
perfect alibi. For the snail, the time that I was gone from the room
would fall into one of those gaps between the frames of flickering
existence. Her sense of continuity, assuming snails have one, would
simply not register the gap.

So the sensory experience of all living beings is a purely artificial
perceptual construct created in the imagination. There is a Zen story
in which two monks are looking at a flag that is waving in the wind.
The first one says, "The flag is waving." The second one says, "No,
the wind is moving." Their teacher comes over and they pose him the
question. "Who's right? I say the flag is moving. He says the wind is
moving." The teacher says, "You are both wrong. Only consciousness is
moving." As consciousness moves, it imagines the world into existence.

So the mind is a field of energy and information. Every idea is also
energy and information. You have imagined your physical body and the
whole physical world into existence by perceiving energy soup as
distinct physical entities. But where does the mind responsible for
this imagination come from?

Level 3:

THE NONLOCAL DOMAIN

The third level of existence consists of intelligence, or
consciousness. This can be called the virtual domain, the spiritual
domain, the field of potential, the universal being, or nonlocal
intelligence. This is where information and energy emerge from a sea
of possibilities. The most fundamental, basic level of nature is not
material; it is not even energy and information soup; it is pure
potential. This level of nonlocal reality operates beyond the reach of
space and time, which simply do not exist at this level. We call it
nonlocal because it cannot be confined by a location-it is not "in"
you or "out there." It simply is.

The intelligence of the spiritual domain is what organizes "energy
soup" into knowable entities. It is what binds quantum particles into
atoms, atoms into molecules, molecules into structures. It is the
organizing force behind all things. This can be a slippery concept to
grasp. One relatively simple way of thinking about this virtual domain
is to recognize the dual nature of your own thoughts. As you read
these words, your eyes are seeing the black print on the page, and
your mind is translating the print into symbols-letters and words-and
then trying to deduce their meaning. But take a step back and ask, Who
is it that is doing the reading? What is the consciousness that
underlies your thoughts? Become aware of the duality of these interior
processes. Your mind is busy decoding, analyzing, and translating. So
who is doing the reading? With this one little twist of attention you
may become aware that there is a presence within you, a force that is
always doing the experiencing. This is the soul, or nonlocal
intelligence, and its experience takes place at the virtual level.

Just as information and energy forge the physical world, this nonlocal
domain ("without location") creates and orchestrates the activity of
information and energy. According to best-selling author and
metaphysical pioneer Larry Dossey, M.D., nonlocal events have three
important qualities that distinguish them from events confined to the
physical world: They are correlated, and this correlation is
unmediated, unmitigated, and immediate. Let's briefly explore what he
means by this.

The behavior of two or more subatomic events is acausally
interrelated, meaning that "one event is not the cause of another
event, yet the behavior of one is immediately correlated or
coordinated with the other." In other words, they seem to be dancing
to the same tune, even though they are not communicating with each
other in the conventional sense. This is the meaning of unmediated.

The correlation between these nonlocal events is also unmitigated,
which means that the strength of the correlation remains undiminished
with distance in space and time. For example, if you and I were in a
room talking, my voice would sound very different than if we were
standing across the street from each other. At that greater distance
my voice would sound much weaker, if you could hear me at all. If you
were in the nonlocal domain, I would be heard clearly, regardless of
whether I was standing right next to you, across the street, a mile
away, or even on another continent.

Third, immediate means that no travel time is needed for nonlocal
events. We are all familiar with the fact that light and sound travel
at different speeds, which is why we see lightning in the distance
before we hear the rumble of thunder. With nonlocal events there is no
such lag time, because nonlocal correlations do not follow the laws of
classical physics. There is no signal, there is no light, and there is
no sound. There is no "thing" that has to travel. Correlations between
events that occur at the nonlocal or virtual level occur instantly,
without cause, and without any weakening over time or distance.

Nonlocal intelligence is everywhere at once, and can cause multiple
effects simultaneously in various locations. It is from this virtual
domain that everything in the world is organized and synchronized.
This, then, is the source of the coincidences that are so important to
synchrodestiny. When you learn to live from this level, you can
spontaneously fulfill your every desire. You can create miracles.

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