Deepak Chopra responds to skeptics and reflects on the nature of mystical experiences — angels, encounters with the departed, heavenly realms. He frames all such experiences through non-dual awareness as modifications of consciousness, none more or less real than ordinary perception.
Transcript
Over the years, for a long time now, I had encounters with skeptics like, Richard Dawkins, who's not only a skeptic, but a cynic. He calls himself a militant atheist. I've had encounters with other people like Michael Shermer, who actually has a magazine called Skeptic and all of them ridicule things like heavenly realms, angels, near death experiences, communication with departed ones and of course, emphasize the rational mind and everyday experiences as real and the others as unreal. But if you unpack this deeper mystery emerges everything I've said. Heavenly realms, angels, NDEs, departed loved ones, your own body, your relationships and the so-called external world are nothing but ripples, patterned modifications in consciousness appearing as experience. None of them is ontologically more real or less real than others. They differ only in subtlety, intensity and the beliefs and Saṁskāras that shape them. So if you go deep into Yoga and Advaita. Vṛttis are movements or whirlpools in mind stuff that present as thoughts, perceptions entire worlds of experience. The same basic structure of Vṛtti can appear as a memory, a sensed perception and astral vision, or the feeling of me in a body, in a world. From the standpoint of pure awareness - Sākṣīn, every cognition is just a mental modification illumined by the same changeless light of consciousness. The experiences of higher Lokas, deities angels guides, and near death states are refinements of Vṛtti, taking subtler objects, myth imagery, luminous beings other planes of space time. They may carry powerful, transformative impact, but structurally they are still cognitions. Intentional mental modes shaped by prior belief, culture, and deep karmic impressions. Encounters with the Dead are likewise appearances and awareness in which the object of the Vṛtti is a loved one no longer perceivable through the physical senses. This sense of this is my body, these are my relationships today, my father, my mother, my brothers, my sisters, and the physical world today that you are encountering also arises in Vṛttis only more stabilized and inter subjectively reinforced. What we call material is simply a very coherent, collectively conditioned pattern of perception shared Vṛttis that we take as solid external reality. Your current relationships are moving constellations or memory expectation, projection and feeling, all of which are recognized in Yoga as mind fluctuations rather than independent entities. Now, here's an interesting beliefs shape Vṛttis what you believe will shape the Vṛttis, but belief itself is a combination of beliefs themselves are Vṛttis, these stable thought forms that filter and organize what can appear. A belief in angels or certain Lokas, makes that symbolic language available for subtle experiences. A materialist belief system like the belief system of a Richard Dawkins or a Michael Shermer channels similar energies into neurological or psychological narratives. In both cases, consciousness takes a particular shape, mental mode and that shape determines the world you will encounter as real at that moment. So from a non-dual standpoint, there's equal radiance. There is only pure consciousness, self luminous and without second. Vṛttis is arrive and dissolved within it like ripples on an unmoving ocean. Because every experience grow or subtle, sacred or mundane is only a modification of this one field. No experience is ultimately more real than another or more illusionary than another. With deep practice, this is revealed that one is not a better Vṛtti than the other. But your identity as awareness is the source of all Vṛttis, and including your belief in a separate self and a solid world. They all arise and subside as Vṛttis, so what is real? Only the you. the field in which the Vṛttis are generated. As Lord Krishna says, I’m the field and I am the knower of the field.