MBR ISSUE 44

Malta Business Review
MANAGEMENT PERSPECTIVES
THE MOST IMPORTANT WAY TO INCREASE
YOUR POTENTIAL
By Deepak Chopra
Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Founda on and co-founder of The Chopra
Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integra ve medicine and personal
transforma on, and is Board Cer ed in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism. He is a
Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Associa on of Clinical
Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages,
including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are The Healing Self co-authored
with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Fron ers of
Mind/Body Medicine.
Deepak Chopra
By now many people are familiar with the term
“positive psychology,” although they might not
realize its significance. Medicine proceeds by
diagnosing diseases and attempting to cure them,
and as a branch of medicine, psychiatry and
psychology focused for decades on the pathology
of the mind. It took an enormous change in attitude
to switch the focus to the positive potential of the
mind. Positive psychology therefore addresses
issues like how to be happy, to increase self-esteem,
to promote well-being and so on.
One can think of this shift toward human potential in
much bigger terms. There are so-called paranormal
or psi abilities—are they a hidden potential in us?
There is the exploration of higher consciousness,
investigating the possibility of waking up from the
dream of pain and suffering and ultimately taking
the mind to a more evolved state. If you collect
all the areas of expanded human potential, which
includes creativity, insight, the renunciation of
violence, Yoga, meditation, and much more—there
is enough to revolutionize our conception of mind.
Once this happens, then we have a foundation for
redefining what it means to be human.
In an open society it’s hard to find someone who
hasn’t dabbled in human potential, beginning
with the most popular aspect, which is selfimprovement.
The desire to improve yourself is
an expression of the impulse to evolve, which is
unstoppable in human beings. But having painted
this picture, one needs to ask if the human
potential movement is bearing fruit. Is it moving
fast enough? Are reactionary forces pulling society
in the opposite direction?
There is an important personal choice, I believe,
that turns dabbling into commitment. It’s the
choice to envision yourself as an expression of
consciousness. For most people this would be a
radical step, because they see themselves in other
ways. Take a moment and mentally take stock. Do
you agree with the statement, “I am my body”?
Do you place importance on your income, social
status, possessions, and other external validations?
Consider the harsh political divisions in this
country—which side do you identify with?
A frank selfassessment
quickly
indicates that each
of us identifies with
various tags, labels,
issues, habits,
and a wide range
of conditioning.
Let’s take a nonjudgmental
perspective and
neutralize words
like good and bad,
right and wrong,
politically correct
and incorrect, and
so on. From a completely neutral position, anything
you identify with is a product of consciousness.
We have all spent our lives surrounded by these
products. In effect, we are wearing virtual reality
goggles through which we view the world, filtering
every perception through our habits, beliefs,
conditioning, likes and dislikes.
The human potential movement at bottom is
about one thing: getting free of virtual reality in
order to experience the “real” reality. Keeping
our neutral viewpoint for a moment, what is
the best way to divest ourselves of the mental
constructs—products of consciousness—that
create pain, suffering, frustration, victimhood, and
self-limitation? The answer is not to winnow out
the bad stuff and accentuate the good stuff. Of
course everyone wants to be good, but one quickly
discovers that there’s no real agreement on what is
good, and furthermore, life is inevitably a mixture
of good and bad.
There is a different answer for ending pain and
suffering, which is to stop identifying with the
products of consciousness and to start identifying
with consciousness itself. Right now we are like
visitors to an art museum wandering around
saying “I like this one” and “I don’t like that one,”
all the while never realizing that artists painted
the pictures. Artists are free to paint anything they
want, and questions of taste come second. The
same is true of consciousness. We wander through
life saying, “I like this about myself” and “I don’t like
that about myself,” without seeing that these are
secondary reactions. To live creatively is to know
that consciousness is the common element of
experience, the “stuff” from which human reality
is made.
When you see that you are a co-creator with
every other consciousness agent in the world,
you have truly entered the movement for higher
consciousness, personal evolution, overcoming
all the imprisoning mental constructs that create
hated, prejudice, and other divisive forces, along
with all the inner forces that enforce the divided self.
Taken altogether, the products of consciousness,
whether you look at history or just the contents of
a normal person’s mind, are chaotic. They contain
huge gaps, contradictions, blind spots, irrational
prejudices, and impulses of anger, fear, jealousy,
and self-doubt that have enormous power over us.
This chaos represents the misuse of consciousness.
What we call human nature isn’t natural at all but a
totally artificial, jerry-built Frankenstein’s monster,
a creation that has turned upon its creator. Among
all the contradictions that exist in human nature,
which force us to be loving one moment and hateful
the next, rational but deeply irrational, proud but
secretly ashamed, the ultimate contradiction is
that we create the products of consciousness and
then believe in them as if they exist independently
of us. No aspect of human nature exists outside
consciousness, and when we cannot change the
things we fear, we are renouncing consciousness,
the very thing that creates those fears. Once
we identify with consciousness itself, we will no
longer be defined by anything except the infinite
possibilities that are the ground state of reality.
To say “I am the field of infinite potential” is the
proper definition of being human. MBR
CREDITLINE: www.deepakchopra.com
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