Deepak Chopra is one of the most influential spiritual thinkers of our time, and he shares some mind-blowing wisdom connecting consciousness, psychedelics and our overall health in a new clip promoting this fall’s Fantastic Fungi Global Summit.
“All there is is consciousness, modulating itself as experience,” the Indian-American author tells filmmaker Louie Schwartzberg, who directed Fantastic Fungi, now streaming on Netflix.
Before making a proclamation that mystics have been repeating for millennia, he asks a fundamental question for all to consider: “What is it that knows the mind?”
“If you can observe your thoughts, then you are obviously not your thoughts,” he continues. “If you can observe something, you are intrinsically free from your observation. So what is that? That’s consciousness — the knowing element in every experience, including the knowing element I have a mind, I have thoughts.”
“And where is this consciousness?” he asks. A scientist would likely answer that it is found in the brain, but Deepak Chopra has a much wider view. “It doesn’t have a form, so it’s infinite,” he says. “So, it’s not local. But it appears as this [world]. It appears as this locality, but even this locality is being processed non-locally in the infinite mind.”
Psychedelics are tools that help us dive deeper into consciousness, and can completely transform our perception of the visual world, an effect that supports Chopra’s far-out perspective rooted in Eastern philosophy and spirituality. So, whether you think consciousness lives exclusively in the human brain or the infinite mind, it is a concept central to understanding psychedelic drugs and how they can benefit us. It will also be a central point of discussion at the Fantastic Fungi Global Summit, a free virtual event Schwartzberg is hosting this year from October 15th through the 17th.
Chopra, who has long been an advocate for psychedelics and other natural remedies, says there are “many applications.” In this particular clip, he emphasizes microdosing, and recommends “combining meditation, music, psychedelics, and a little bit of explanation that reality is not what you’re seeing.”
The scientific community has already proven time and time again that psychedelic-assisted therapy will reduce depression and anxiety — two mental health issues Chopra highlights, as well. “Particularly what they call free-floating depression and anxiety,” he says. “A person has depression and anxiety, [but] they don’t know why.”
As advanced as our society is, we’re still in the dark about what causes certain diseases and illnesses to manifest in patients. The National Institute on Aging, for example, states “scientists don’t yet fully understand what causes Alzheimer’s disease in most people.” But science is increasingly finding that our mental and physical health is linked.
“Existential anxiety, existential depression, and now we are seeing low-grade inflammation go together,” Chopra says. “And we are also seeing science showing us that these things precede chronic illness by decades. So, Alzheimer’s may take three decades of low-grade anxiety, low-grade depression and low-grade inflammation to manifest.”
