Guest Blog: Deepak Chopra (excerpt)

One quick and important news announcement: Ransom: The Anthology is going out of print at the end of the month. Edited by Dylan Birtolo (eyezofwolf), the collection features my short story, "Don't Let Go," (which has, in short form, part of my treatise about religion, folk tales, and fairy tales), as well as a host of excellent stories by other authors. Get it before it can no longer be gotten!

It's been a slow week here at the blog, in part because I've been wrapped up in spending time away from the computer, relaxing. (That, in part, has been due to our air conditioner existing only upstairs, coupled with my reluctance to have a warm laptop on my lap.) In the meantime, I've been catching up on review books and library books I'm supposed to have finished and have fallen a bit behind on my own fiction writing -- some of which was supposed to be turned in to my crit group yesterday. (Luckily for me, the other two substraters with the same deadline also neglected to turn in their work, so I'm in good company.)

At any rate, while going through my library books, I picked up Everyday Immortality: A Concise Course in Spiritual Transformation, which I'd picked up off the shelf in the comparative religion section (Dewey: 204.2) and thought might hold some interesting thoughts for excerpting. Little did I know that it's similar, in some ways, to a Christian devotional book. The devotional readings I've done have primarily been short essays, or excerpts from the works of Christian scholars, coupled with Bible verses they illuminate. They're meant to provoke thought and consideration.

In Chopra's book, the intent is the same, but the method is different. On each page, he offers a sutra or koan, one simple sentence jam packed with possible meaning. He recommends meditating for five to ten minutes, reading a passage, then meditating on it thereafter. If it immediately makes intuitive sense, move onto the next sentence. Instead of being guided by an accompanying message, the sentences themselves are the message -- as is what the reader brings to them.

Chopra is a big proponent of what he calls the quantum mechanical body, and he relates new discoveries in science to a higher way of understanding the world. So, without further ado, a few sentences as thoughts for the day. (This guest blog excerpt is necessarily short, due to the nature of the book being excerpted.)

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Subatomic particles are not material things; they are fluctuations of energy and information in a huge void.

Subatomic particles flicker in and out of existence depending on whether I am watching them or not.

Before my decision to observe them, subatomic particles are probability amplitudes of mathematical ghosts in a field of infinite possibilities.

When I make the choice to observe the subatomic world of mathematical ghosts, the ghosts freeze into space-time events or particles that ultimately manifest as matter.

My physical body and the body of the physical universe are both proportionately as void as intergalactic space.

The essential nature of my material body and that of the solid-appearing universe is that they are both nonmaterial. They are made up of non-stuff.