CONTENTS

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Deepak Chopra

  Title Page

  Praise

  Preface

  PART ONE: The Land Where No One Is Old

  IN PRACTICE: How to Reinterpret Your Body

  PART TWO: Aging and Awareness

  IN PRACTICE: Using the Power of Awareness

  PART THREE: Defeating Entropy

  IN PRACTICE: The Wisdom of Uncertainty

  PART FOUR: The Science of Longevity

  IN PRACTICE: Breath of Life

  PART FIVE: Breaking the Spell of Mortality

  IN PRACTICE: The Timeless Way

  Index

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  ‘Ageing is much more of a choice than people ever dream.’ In this revolutionary book, Dr Deepak Chopra shows us how we can all control the ageing process.

  A million-copy worldwide bestseller, Ageless Body, Timeless Mind combines scientifically supported theory and a wealth of practical exercises to demonstrate the extent to which sickness and ageing are created by nothing more than gaps in our selfknowledge. By increasing this self-knowledge, we can master simple yet effective ways to metabolize time, and achieve our unbounded potential.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Dr. Deepak Chopra is the founder of the Chopra Center for Well Being in Carlsbad, California. He is the author of over thirty books, which have become international bestsellers and classics of their kind.

  ALSO BY DEEPAK CHOPRA

  Creating Health

  Return of the Rishi

  Quantum Healing

  Perfect Health

  Unconditional Life

  Journey into Healing

  Creating Affluence

  Perfect Weight

  Restful Sleep

  The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success

  Boundless Energy

  Perfect Digestion

  The Way of the Wizard

  Overcoming Addictions

  The Path to Love

  The Seven Spiritual Laws for Parents

  The Love Poems of Rumi (edited by Deepak Chopra; translated by Deepak Chopra and Fereydoun Kia)

  Everyday Immortality

  How to Know God

  The Soul in Love

  Grow Younger, Live Longer

  The Deeper Wound

  Golf for Enlightenment

  Magical Beginnings, Enchanted Lives

  Soulmate

  Peace is the Way

  SynchroDestiny

  The Book of Secrets

  Life After Death

  The Third Jesus

  Ageless Body, Timeless Mind

  A Practical Alternative to Growing Old

  Deepak Chopra

  ‘Deepak Chopra is one of the most important healers of our time. Ageless Body, Timeless Mind is a treasure’ Marianne Williamson, author of A Woman’s Worth

  ‘Ageing is much more of a choice than people ever dream.’ In this revolutionary book, Dr Deepak Chopra shows us how we can all control the ageing process.

  A million-copy worldwide bestseller, Ageless Body, Timeless Mind combines scientifically supported theory and a wealth of practical exercises to demonstrate the extent to which sickness and ageing are created by nothing more than gaps in our self-knowledge. By increasing this self-knowledge, we can master simple yet effective ways to metabolize time, and achieve our unbounded potential.

  ‘Drawing on both modern science and ancient wisdom, here is a model of health and illness that can stand the test of scientific scrutiny because of one simple fact: it works’

  Larry Dossey, author of Reinventing Medicine

  ‘A renowned physician and author, Deepak Chopra is undoubtedly one of the most lucid and inspired philosophers of our time’ Mikhail Gorbachev

  PREFACE

  I look back on this as the most optimistic book I’ve ever written. I hope that sense of promise continues to fill these pages, because ‘the new old age’, as the media calls it, continues to advance, raising life expectancy and improving many of the ills and deficits of growing old. But the new old age cannot truly be new without a spiritual vision. To grow old should arrive as the crown of life – a phrase dating back to ancient Rome. Mere survival, even to the century mark, doesn’t deserve that rich accolade. The crown is bestowed for wisdom, and wisdom in its purest definition means that you have learned to live the mystery of life. We have been given one of the longest life spans of any creature on earth, not for biology’s sake – the moment a person’s genes are passed on through having a child, the naked interest of biology has been served – but for the sake of the soul. It takes time for a soul to mature. When it does, there is no more beautiful thing in creation. Then old age is more than a crown; it is a revelation.

  One unfortunate trend since this book first appeared over ten years ago is that biology has crowded out wisdom more and more. It would benefit mankind enormously if the cure for Alzheimer’s were to appear, if human growth factor could be used to reverse physical deterioration, and if the most stubborn scourge of old age – cancer – could be eradicated. Yet for all this promise, what is the point of keeping the human body from wasting away if in the end it remains a machine? It is sad to watch a finely crafted machine rust slowly in the rain, I grant. We are subject to physical forces such as entropy that tempt us to see ourselves like that. But entropy doesn’t rule over spirit; decay bows before evolution, which is the master hand in creation.

  I wanted this book to give a glimpse of the master hand at work. You and I are its handiwork but also its co-creators. The business of life isn’t breathing, eating, and sleeping. Those are maintenance for the body – and important to attend to on their own level. The real business of life, however, is to find out who you really are. In the title of this book I called the human body ageless and the human mind timeless because they are our links to immortality. I meant that literally when this book first appeared, and now, when spiritual dignity is the single greatest need of every person, the truth must be repeated:

  You are the reason for life to exist, not the other way around.

  You are the goal of an eternal mystery.

  You are the sleeping god ready to awaken.

  Long life is worthwhile finally because, in the length of days, you and I will realize these truths together. In that belief this edition of Ageless Body, Timeless Mind is offered.

  Deepak Chopra

  PART ONE

  The Land Where No One Is Old

  People don’t grow old.

  When they stop growing, they become old.

  ANONYMOUS

  If you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up.

  DOSTOEVSKY

  I move with the infinite in Nature’s power

  I hold the fire of the soul

  I hold life and healing

  RIG VEDA

  Look at these worlds spinning out of nothingness

  That is within your power

  RUMI

  I WOULD LIKE you to join me on a journey of discovery. We will explore a place where the rules of everyday existence do not apply. These rules explicitly state that to grow old, become frail, and die is the ultimate destiny of all. And so it has been for century after century. However, I want you to suspend your assumptions about what we call reality so that we can become pioneers in a land where youthful vigor, renewal, creativity, joy, fulfillment, and timelessness are the common experience of everyday life, where old age, senility, infirmity, and death do not exist and are not even entertained as a possibility.

  If there is such a place, what is preventing us from going there? It is not some dark continental landmass or dangerous uncharted sea. It is our conditioning, our current collective worldview that we were taught by our parents, teachers, and society. This way of seeing things—the old paradigm—has aptly been called “the hypnosis of social conditioning,” an induced fiction in which we have collectively agreed to participate.

  Your body is aging beyond your control because it has been programmed to live out the rules of that collective conditioning. If there is anything natural and inevitable about the aging process, it cannot be known until the chains of our old beliefs are broken. In order to create the experience of ageless body and timeless mind, which is the promise of this book, you must discard ten assumptions about who you are and what the true nature of the mind and body is. These assumptions form the bedrock of our shared worldview.

  They are:

  There is an objective world independent of the observer, and our bodies are an aspect of this objective world.

  The body is composed of clumps of matter separated from one another in time and space.

  Mind and body are separate and independent from each other.

  Materialism is primary, consciousness is secondary. In other words, we are physical machines that have learned to think.

  Human awareness can be completely explained as the product of biochemistry.

  As individuals, we are disconnected, self-contained entities.

  Our perception of the world is automatic and gives us an accurate picture of how things really are.

  Our true nature is totally defined by the body, ego, and personality. We are wisps of memories and desires enclosed in packages of flesh and bones.

  Time exists as an absolute, and
we are captives of that absolute. No one escapes the ravages of time.

  Suffering is necessary—it is part of reality. We are inevitable victims of sickness, aging, and death.

  These assumptions reach far beyond aging to define a world of separation, decay, and death. Time is seen as a prison that no one escapes; our bodies are biochemical machines that, like all machines, must run down. “At a certain age,” Lewis Thomas once affirmed, “it is in our nature to wear out, to come unhinged, and to die, and that is that.” This position, the hard line of materialistic science, overlooks much about human nature. We are the only creatures on earth who can change our biology by what we think and feel. We possess the only nervous system that is aware of the phenomenon of aging. Old lions and tigers do not realize what is happening to them—but we do. And because we are aware, our mental state influences what we are aware of.

  It would be impossible to isolate a single thought or feeling, a single belief or assumption, that doesn’t have some effect on aging, either directly or indirectly. Our cells are constantly eavesdropping on our thoughts and being changed by them. A bout of depression can wreak havoc with the immune system; falling in love can boost it. Despair and hopelessness raise the risk of heart attacks and cancer, thereby shortening life. Joy and fulfillment keep us healthy and extend life. This means that the line between biology and psychology can’t really be drawn with any certainty. A remembered stress, which is only a wisp of thought, releases the same flood of destructive hormones as the stress itself.

  Because the mind influences every cell in the body, human aging is fluid and changeable; it can speed up, slow down, stop for a time, and even reverse itself. Hundreds of research findings from the last three decades have verified that aging is much more dependent on the individual than was ever dreamed of in the past.

  However, the most significant breakthrough is not contained in isolated findings but in a completely new worldview. The ten assumptions of the old paradigm do not accurately describe our reality. They are inventions of the human mind that we have turned into rules. To challenge aging at its core, this entire worldview must be challenged first, for nothing holds more power over the body than beliefs of the mind.

  Each assumption of the old paradigm can be replaced with a more complete and expanded version of the truth. These new assumptions are also just ideas created by the human mind, but they allow us much more freedom and power. They give us the ability to rewrite the program of aging that now directs our cells.

  The ten new assumptions are:

  The physical world, including our bodies, is a response of the observer. We create our bodies as we create the experience of our world.

  In their essential state, our bodies are composed of energy and information, not solid matter. This energy and information is an outcropping of infinite fields of energy and information spanning the universe.

  The mind and body are inseparably one. The unity that is “me” separates into two streams of experience. I experience the subjective stream as thoughts, feelings, and desires. I experience the objective stream as my body. At a deeper level, however, the two streams meet at a single creative source. It is from this source that we are meant to live.

  The biochemistry of the body is a product of awareness. Beliefs, thoughts, and emotions create the chemical reactions that uphold life in every cell. An aging cell is the end product of awareness that has forgotten how to remain new.

  Perception appears to be automatic, but in fact it is a learned phenomenon. The world you live in, including the experience of your body, is completely dictated by how you learned to perceive it. If you change your perception, you change the experience of your body and your world.

  Impulses of intelligence create your body in new forms every second. What you are is the sum total of these impulses, and by changing their patterns, you will change.

  Although each person seems separate and independent, all of us are connected to patterns of intelligence that govern the whole cosmos. Our bodies are part of a universal body, our minds an aspect of a universal mind.

  Time does not exist as an absolute, but only eternity. Time is quantified eternity, timelessness chopped up into bits and pieces (seconds, hours, days, years) by us. What we call linear time is a reflection of how we perceive change. If we could perceive the changeless, time would cease to exist as we know it. We can learn to start metabolizing non-change, eternity, the absolute. By doing that, we will be ready to create the physiology of immortality.

  Each of us inhabits a reality lying beyond all change. Deep inside us, unknown to the five senses, is an innermost core of being, a field of non-change that creates personality, ego, and body. This being is our essential state—it is who we really are.

  We are not victims of aging, sickness, and death. These are part of the scenery, not the seer, who is immune to any form of change. This seer is the spirit, the expression of eternal being.

  These are vast assumptions, the makings of a new reality, yet all are grounded in the discoveries of quantum physics made almost a hundred years ago. The seeds of this new paradigm were planted by Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, and the other pioneers of quantum physics, who realized that the accepted way of viewing the physical world was false. Although things “out there” appear to be real, there is no proof of reality apart from the observer. No two people share exactly the same universe. Every worldview creates its own world.

  I want to convince you that you are much more than your limited body, ego, and personality. The rules of cause and effect as you accept them have squeezed you into the volume of a body and the span of a lifetime. In reality, the field of human life is open and unbounded. At its deepest level, your body is ageless, your mind timeless. Once you identify with that reality, which is consistent with the quantum worldview, aging will fundamentally change.

  Ending the Tyranny of the Senses

  Why do we accept anything as real? Because we can see and touch it. Everyone has a prejudice in favor of things that are reassuringly three-dimensional, as reported to us by our five senses. Sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell serve to reinforce the same message: things are what they seem. According to this reality, the Earth is flat, the ground beneath your feet is stationary, the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, all because it seems that way to the senses. As long as the five senses were accepted without question, such facts were immutable.

  Einstein realized that time and space are also products of our five senses; we see and touch things that occupy three dimensions, and we experience events as happening in sequential order. Yet Einstein and his colleagues were able to remove this mask of appearances. They reassembled time and space into a new geometry that had no beginning or end, no edges, no solidity. Every solid particle in the universe turned out to be a ghostly bundle of energy vibrating in an immense void.

  The old space-time model was smashed, replaced by a timeless, flowing field of constant transformation. This quantum field isn’t separate from us—it is us. Where Nature goes to create stars, galaxies, quarks, and leptons, you and I go to create ourselves. The great advantage of this new worldview is that it is so immensely creative—the human body, like everything else in the cosmos, is constantly being made anew every second. Although your senses report that you inhabit a solid body in time and space, this is only the most superficial layer of reality. Your body is something far more miraculous—a flowing organism empowered by millions of years of intelligence. This intelligence is dedicated to overseeing the constant change that takes place inside you. Every cell is a miniature terminal connected to the cosmic computer.

  From this perspective, it hardly seems possible that human beings could age at all. Weak and helpless as a newborn baby appears, it is superbly defended against time’s ravages. If a baby could preserve its nearly invulnerable immune status, we would all live at least two hundred years, according to physiologists’ estimates. If a baby could preserve its glistening smooth arteries, as supple as silk, cholesterol would not find anywhere to lodge, and heart disease would be unknown. Each of a newborn’s 50 trillion cells is limpid as a raindrop, without a trace of toxic debris; such cells have no reason to age, because nothing inside them has begun to disrupt their perfect functioning. A baby’s cells are not really new, however—the atoms in them have been circulating through the cosmos for billions of years. But the baby is made new by an invisible intelligence that has come together to shape a unique life-form. The timeless field has invented a new dance step, the pulsating rhythms of a newborn’s body.