What if it were possible to move beyond your present mental and physical limitations to access a field of infinite possibilities that can radically change everything in your life?
If that sounds too good to be true, stick with me for a second.
According to Deepak Chopra’s latest book METAHUMAN: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, infinite potential can be your personal reality.
How? By becoming ‘metahuman’: someone who can obliterate constructs of the mind and body to enter a state of awareness in which we have deliberate and concrete access to peak experiences (like moments of pure bliss, genius, perfect health, and connection to everyone and everything around us).
According to Chopra, you can say goodbye to loneliness, diseases, poverty, and fear-based living, and instead embrace absolute freedom in all you think, say, and do.
I sat down with Chopra to get some more insights into how we all can become metahuman and unleash our infinite potential:
Author Deepak Chopra / PHOTO COURTESY OF JEREMIAH SULLIVANDarrah Brustien: Why this book and why now?
Deepak Chopra: I felt it was time to give readers a complete picture of how consciousness created the universe and everything in it, including us. It’s a daring concept, but I like radical challenges to received opinions. This one certainly was!
Brustein: Why are people stuck in the ‘illusion’ that creates outcomes we’ve come to expect, like loneliness, disease, poverty, and fear-based living?
Chopra: Every human problem is embedded in a cloud of causes, as I call it. There are countless ways to describe why people are depressed, anxious, impoverished, and so on. But if you pierce through the fog, the root of the problem is always found in consciousness, which is also where the root of the solution lies.
Brustein: What does it mean to be metahuman?
Chopra: “Meta” is Greek for “beyond”, so “metahuman” means going beyond the normal limitations that everyone thinks apply to human beings. I think those limitations are mind-made, and what the mind has made it can unmake.
Brustein: What could life be like if we became metahuman?
Chopra: We would no longer find ourselves in confusion and conflict. As consciousness dawns, you become more awake, and eventually, you arrive at the awakened life. Since an awakened life is based on the ultimate reality, pure consciousness, there is no predicting what will change. But all the changes will be in a positive direction.
Brustein: Can you explain the difference between our personal realities and who we really are?
Chopra: At this moment everyone has built up a story that defines them, filled with labels, experiences, beliefs, habits, fears, and desires. This story is totally mind-made. It is a work of fiction in which the author is also the main protagonist! Drop the fiction and by definition what you are left with must be real.
Deepak Chopra’s book, Meta HumanIMAGE COURTESY OF DEEPAK CHOPRABrustein: How much control do we each have over the realities we experience?
Chopra: Most people would say that they have no control, and they’d be right. The personal reality you accept envelops your body, mind, and spirit. But one thing remains unchanged: access to the control switch. This switch is reached by going beyond normal expectations to discover what is really possible.
Brustein: How do you know that human potential is infinite, as you say, and how can a skeptic begin to understand this perspective?
Chopra: The basis for such a claim is simple, and indeed right before our eyes. No matter how many thoughts a person has had, there’s an unlimited number of thoughts to be had. The same is true of language. There is an unlimited number of words to combine into an unlimited number of sentences, which can be placed in an unlimited number of books. Therefore, I think that infinite potential is normal and should be everyone’s starting point.
Brustein: In the book, you share 31 days worth of exercises to help people connect with their metahuman nature. What is a great first step?
Chopra: Close your eyes and sense your body. Feel any sensation that comes to mind. This is a direct experience, based not even on the concept of a physical body. Now ask yourself if it is possible to work to a better future for your body if you addressed this direct experience instead of ideas about body image, youth, aging, and so on. I think the answer has to be yes.
Brustein: One of your chapters is titled, ‘Existence and consciousness are the same’. Please explain.
Chopra: This is a fundamental concept and one that everyone is trying to grapple with. Science has failed entirely to say where consciousness originated. You cannot locate when, where, or how atoms learned to think, and yet here we are, thinking and using brains that contain nothing but very ordinary atoms and molecules.
Then it arose that maybe consciousness is woven into the fabric of the universe, a very old notion to which physics is just catching up. But this idea, called panpsychism, has its own set of problems, one of them being the same old one of how to tell if atoms and molecules are thinking.
My answer is that we don’t have consciousness; we are consciousness. It is part of existence, which is why you cannot find a place where consciousness was created. It simply is.
Brustein: What does it mean to ‘wake up’?
Chopra: It means to become more conscious until the process reaches its goal, which is a completely conscious life.
Brustein: Please talk about the distinction between “I am X” and “I am”.
Chopra: If you take a random snapshot of anyone’s life and examine it, you can identify all kinds of qualities having to do with race, age, gender, skin color, and so on. In the stories we have built up around ourselves, the tags we identify with are all of this type. But life isn’t a series of snapshots. It’s a continuous, dynamic, living process that we call existence. So the truth is that “I am” is the only true statement you can make for everyone at any time of life. Everything else is about labels and tags, which have no life in them.
Brustein: Please explain the art of not doing.
Chopra: The phrase is Buddhist, and it refers in modern terminology to a set of attitudes one can take. These include patience, allowing, flow, openness, and non-judgment. The goal is to allow life to take care of itself instead of constantly intruding and interfering with it. Needless to say, by the standard of “not doing,” we are all outrageous control freaks, but this can change.
Want more success and fulfillment in your life? Then check out this free masterclass with Deepak Chopra and me. In it, we share the 5 key things you need to know to create a more meaningful life!
This article was originally published on Forbes.