You Are the Universe by Deepak Chopra

Author:Deepak Chopra
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Potter/TenSpeed/Harmony
Published: 2017-02-06T16:00:00+00:00

History has produced more than its fair share of monsters, and when we think about them, we wonder how they could live with themselves. Not just millions but tens of millions of people perished as a result of the actions of Hitler, Stalin, and Chairman Mao. It’s chilling to see the home movies of Hitler playing with little children, taking time off from being a monster to assume the part of a smiling uncle.

Why didn’t guilt set in? One explanation traces back to an aspect of human psychology that’s fairly common, called splitting, also known as black-and-white thinking. Splitting occurs when a person can’t join the positive and negative sides of their personality. We all compartmentalize our psychology, keeping under wraps what we don’t want other people to see, but splitting takes it to the extreme, allowing someone to be a monster and a nice person without the two sides ever meeting. When neighbors of serial killers invariably describe the murderer as normal and nice, this may be evidence of splitting. The price of living with monstrous deeds is to separate existence into two compartments that do not communicate.

Splitting has a scientific side, too, if we use the term metaphorically. As we’ve touched upon several times, Einstein’s relativistic model is extremely accurate at describing how gravity works and the behavior of large objects in space-time, while quantum theory is equally precise in its description of how the other three fundamental forces work and the behavior of very small objects. The importance of this schism seems abstract. If you know how everything, large and small, behaves, isn’t that the same as complete knowledge?

The problem comes down to a simple fact that affects all of us. There is only one reality, not two. A person who has split off his monstrous side is still responsible for what the split-off part did. In court, the good side isn’t let off while the bad side goes to jail. Physics has lived with its split for over a century, attempting to unify reality but with limited success. This is a case in which ordinary people have a stake, because the way we live our lives depends on what we accept as real. It was inconceivable in the Middle Ages to live one’s life while shutting out God. In an age of faith, nothing was more real than God, and excluding its reality, as it seemed, would be tantamount to delusion, a crime against nature, and surely lead to eternal damnation.

Today we live our lives blithely without paying any attention to the quantum world, and no one is being accused of delusion or heresy; it seems innocuous to split off this most fundamental level of reality. But in this book we contend that reality is basically human, and that claim doesn’t hold water if the quantum world is excluded. It’s precisely quantum behavior that matters the most. Here’s a prime example. In the game of Scrabble you look at your letter tiles, and you have A, O, R, S, S, S, U, U, which looks pretty hopeless.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.