Deepak Chopra speaks on non-material consciousness

Deepak Chopra talked extensively about the nature of non-material consciousness in a session titled ‘The Return of the Rishi’ at Jaipur Literature Festival saying that this kind of consciousness exists outside of space-time: ‘it’s unborn and never dies.

He said it is the most fundamental level of reality, the ‘being’ level, from which everything comes and everything returns to. The second level is ‘feeling,’ the highest feelings love, compassion, equanimity and joy, the third level is ‘thinking,’ in terms of imagination and the creative process, and the fourth level is ‘doing.’  The author quoted from mystics and teachings of wisdom including the Gita, Tagore, Christ, Buddha and Rumi. He said the three main insights of mystics throughout history were transcendence, ethical morality and the experiential understanding of immortality. An ‘ecosystem’ can return to the level of being at any time and ask for the creative process to unfold from a compassionate level.

He said his motto in life was ‘Do less and accomplish more, and ultimately do nothing and accomplish everything.’ He talked of stress arising when you confuse your real self with your self-image, and said it was important to be skeptical but it should be differentiated from cynical mistrust. He said that birth and death are opposites, not life and death, since it is all life and we are dying all the time, pointing out that ‘death and resurrection’ was the eternal theme in the creative process, and as such, we should learn to “die to the past as in the karmic bondage that comes from the conditioning of the past, and focus instead to live in the moment.”