How “radical well-being” leads to peak performance | Deepak Chopra | Big Think Edge

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Welcome! I'm Victoria Montgomery Brown, CEO of Big Think, and I will be moderating today's discussion. Today's webinar is on radical well-being—essentially, how do we be our best selves mentally, physically, and spiritually even in times of massive uncertainty like we're in today? Our exceptional guest today is Dr. Deepak Chopra; he's a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine, a best-selling author, and founder of the Chopra Foundation, among many other things.

For those of you if this is your first webinar at Big Think, we have a 45-minute discussion and an audience Q&A about twenty minutes into it. So, whenever a platform you're on, if you could type your questions into the comment box, and you can start immediately, and we'll get to them as soon as the Q&A begins. So welcome, Deepak, and thank you so much for being here.

Dr. Deepak Chopra: “Thank you, Victoria. It's nice to be here.”

Victoria Montgomery Brown: “So, you talked about kind of secular spirituality that we're moving toward. How can we process the deeper significance of this moment for humanity and the planet, regardless of our religious or cultural beliefs?”

Dr. Deepak Chopra: “I think we have to look at this pandemic in three ways. Number one, the threat to our physical well-being and our capacity to survive this infection once it's transmitted. Second is the financial suffering that is already happening. And the third is the pandemic of stress that is compromising immune systems and increasing inflammation in our body, and nobody is talking about that, but that is as much a threat as the physical infection itself. All the data is showing that when you're acutely stressed, you have something called a cytokine storm, which means your body goes into an inflammatory state. People who are already at risk already have chronic inflammation—people with diabetes, cancer, and autoimmune illness, or elderly people, or people who are taking several medications are already at risk. They already have chronic inflammation, but stress aggravates that and increases the likelihood of what we call these psycho-cytokine storms, which makes the infection much more dangerous and much more likely to cause severe morbidity and even mortality.”

Victoria Montgomery Brown: “So, I think what we should do right now is focus not only on decreasing the transmission, which is being done, but also minimizing the damage once it has already happened. And that can be done through deep rest, good sleep, meditation, mindfulness, movement, mind-body coordination, yoga, deep breathing, healthy emotions and relationships, nutrition—all these things come into play to maximize salvation self-healing or what we call homeostasis participated in some time ago."

Dr. Deepak Chopra: “Let's take a look at that. Radical well-being is more than the absence of disease or infirmity. I think radical well-being is peak performance at all times. So, when I think of radical well-being, I have my own kind of reminders. One is a joyful, energetic body; the second is a loving, compassionate heart; the third is a reflective, alert mind; and the fourth is lightness of being, carefreeness, what these days psychologists call the experience of flow.”

Victoria Montgomery Brown: “So, how do you think we can be guided by the principles of radical well-being in this time?”

Dr. Deepak Chopra: “Well, I mentioned the seven pillars of well-being: sleep, meditation and stress management, movement, yoga, breathing, mind-body coordination, healthy emotions and relationships, clean nutrition—nutrition that doesn't damage a major microbiome through processed inflammatory foods. If you pay attention to these things, you can restore your baseline level of well-being, which is, as I said, self-regulation. Our body homeostasis is defined as the dynamic non-change that happens in your body in the midst of change.”

He continues, “So all the time you're experiencing change perceptually—in our environment, in our emotions, in our thoughts—but your body still maintains a dynamic non-change. Your blood sugar will remain within a certain range; your sleep-wake cycles need to remain normal; your digestive processes—everything that we experience every day; eating, breathing, digestion, metabolism, elimination, sensory experience, thoughts, feelings, emotions, desires, memories—all this is one process in our body. They're not separate processes.”

“You can check in with your body anytime on a scale of one to ten: how much energy do I have right now? Ten would be a more energy to do everything that you want and so it’s exceptional energy, you’re thriving. One would be you don't even want to get out of bed.”

“Now, if you intuitively say to yourself 8, 9, 10, you're thriving physically. If you say 6, 7, 8, you're struggling in some area of your life. And if you say 4, unless you're suffering, you probably have a disease, or you've been diagnosed to have something, or you're depressed, or you have intense anxiety about threat.”

“So, just a simple question like that on the scale of one to ten—you can ask that about your job: on a scale of one to ten, am I feeling secure in my job? Am I expressing my strength? You can say that about your relationship. On a scale of one to ten with family and friends, am I feeling cared for? Am I being heard? Am I being appreciated? Am I accepted?”

“And I'm doing the same thing in reverse again; that gives you a measure of your emotional well-being. Same thing you can say about your community: where am I right now? Is it safe? Is it dangerous? Same thing you can say about your finances: am I secured? Do I have default mechanisms? Do I have insurance? Do I have disability? When you add up all this, you get a picture of your total well-being.”

“And I haven't even mentioned spiritual well-being, which is the degree to which you're in touch with yourself beyond the symbolic representations of yourself, which are mind, body, and the experience of the world. These are symbols of self-awareness in every moment. The world that you're experiencing, irrespective of what everybody else is experiencing, is a reflection of your state of deeper connection with your own self. That's what spiritual well-being is. In times like this, how would you advise us to get started and what would be some of the first things you'd advise people to do?”

Dr. Deepak Chopra: “Well, I have two things that are being offered right now through our foundation. One is a free 21-day meditation experience to manage stress—it's called ‘Hope in Uncertain Times.’ You can go to Chopra Center meditation dot com and download it for free. It's produced by Oprah Winfrey and myself, and we have almost a million people who are actually taking it right now. As I said, it’s free. The other is a film that I produced with Jewel, called ‘The Mindfulness Movement,’ and you can also check that out at mindfulness movement dot com. It not only shows you how people have recovered from chronic illness, from addictive behavior, from depression—including Jewel herself, who was homeless, and then she started these practices—and then this film also has experts like Jon Kabat-Zinn, who's considered one of the pioneers of the mindfulness movement, and also Sara Lazar.”

“There are online resources right now; you go online, and you'll find many resources for managing stress and improving homeostasis, or self-regulation, or healing in your body. In your book ‘Super Genes,’ there’s no experience that you have, no experience including this experience we are having right now that doesn’t have an imprint in the brain. So right now, this conversation is creating neural networks in the frontal cortex—this part of our brain to fire—because this conversation is basically a non-threatening intellectual conversation, or you could say it's an exchange of energy.”

“If you were having emotional experiences, then a different part of your brain gets activated. That's called the limbic brain; it's also called the emotional brain. And so if you're experiencing joy, or peace, or equanimity, or love, or compassion, or empathy, then the limbic brain creates self-regulation by organizing the activity of hormones like dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin and opiates, which are immunomodulators. So, your emotions regulate the immune system. So every experience has an effect in the brain, and every experience is also triggering the activity of your genes. This is the new science that we call epigenetics. So you got 25,000 genes from your parents, which is basically the blueprint for your body, but the activity of your genes is regulated by how you're feeling, what you're thinking, what you're seeing, what you're interpreting, what you're eating—in other words, everything that we call experience.”

“So experience activates certain genes to either cause inflammation or to cause self-regulation. What I’m saying is that your mind, your consciousness, your brain, your neural networks, and your genetic activity, and as a consequence of that, the activity of the genes that we call the microbiome—all that is one integrated process which is literally the metabolism of experience. Any experience that you have—so we metabolize experience into what we call the biological interactions of cells and molecules and organs that are responsible for health and well-being, and it’s all one process: the mind, the body, the neural networks, the genes, the epigenetics, the inflammatory markers, the metabolites, sleep-wake cycles—all of that is a single process. And once you understand that, you can actually consciously regulate your body through these healthy habits, but also actually by quieting the mind and going to a place which is totally still. When your mind is still, your body becomes still, and when your body becomes still, it goes into self-regulation. You can do that anytime, by the way. I call this the ‘STOP’ formula. So anytime you get stressed, you put the pause button, and the acronym is STOP.”

“So S stands for stop, T for three deep breaths, O for observe your breath, because when you observe your breath, we take your attention away from your thoughts, and P now proceed with awareness and compassion. STOP. So this is any time, and if you want to even be quicker, then put the pause button and before you react, observe your reaction to react. That's the highest intelligence: the ability to observe yourself without judging yourself automatically changes your reactivity into more intelligent responses, restful alertness response, intuitive response, creative response, visionary response, sacred response. We have the capacity to respond in an infinite number of ways to any challenge.”

“But what do we do? We use our reptilian brain, our mid-brain, either as a fight or flight response which is very premature and obviously necessary if somebody is mugging you or has a gun on your head. But otherwise, it's a scrimmage of—it's irrelevant—and then we have reactive response: you're either nice or you're nasty, but we are manipulating, or we are stubborn, or you're indifferent, or we are playing the victim. The key to all this is stop condemning, stop blaming, stop complaining, stop playing the victim. Rest in your own being, and then ask yourself, 'What’s the best response to this situation?' Instead of just—as one response—between every two responses, you have an infinite range of choices, and these are learned abilities. Anybody can learn how to do this.”

“Healing—well, the science is very simple. You know when you go to medical school, which I had the privilege of going to many years ago, and then being a doctor, any medical student will tell you that the first two lessons in medical school that they learn, other than anatomy and physiology, the first is called inflammation and the second is called homeostasis. These are the two first lessons we learn in medical school. So inflammation is the body's response to a challenge or to an injury. When you fall down and you break, you have a bruise, for example, that’s acute inflammation and it prevents you from bleeding to death. Or when you have an infection—let's say you get a pneumococcal infection—the acute inflammation you get prevents you from getting pneumococcus unless you have a compromised immune system. So, acute inflammation is actually helpful. When that inflammation goes out of whack as a chronic experience because of chronic stress, that becomes a risk factor for disease.”

“But otherwise, inflammation is protective. Okay, now we have—with COVID-19—we are seeing what are called inflammatory storms, which means very exaggerated inflammation that causes a lot of damage in the body; that makes also compromises the immune system, and makes people sick; sometimes they die from the whole response, which is injury. That’s one aspect of healing. The other aspect of healing is called homeostasis, which means your body, in its baseline status, has what are called feedback loops.”

“Nowadays, scientists speak of cybernetic systems or deep learning systems—artificial intelligence systems that I use for machine learning—but your biology is already doing that. So if your blood sugar goes up, there is a feedback loop in your body that asks for insulin to respond, so your blood sugar can go back to normal; if it goes too low, then other things happen. So all the time, your body is regulating itself: body temperature, blood pressure, blood sugar, hormone levels, immune function, inflammatory markers, digestive processes, sleep-wake cycles, emotions—all of these have feedback loops, which means they're all self-regulating, but we have to allow that to happen. And what interferes with that is stress. What interferes with that is lack of sleep. What interferes with that is a diet that’s full of toxins. What interferes with that is anger and resentment and hostility and grievances and guilt and shame and depression—all these things, which are usually part of our everyday experience. Yet, by simply being the observer of our own self—the non-judgmental observer of your thoughts—you realize that you're not your thoughts; you're the observer of your thoughts. When you're a non-judgmental observer of your emotions, you realize you're not your emotions.”

“When you look at your body and you see that it's changing—first it was a fertilized ovum, then it was a zygote, then it was an infant, then it was a baby, then it was teenage, and now it’s a shifting, changing form—but you're the observer of that shifting changing form. What do we call the observer? I—not 'I am Deepak Chopra'—because I is the observer of Deepak Chopra as well. So, when I go back to this most fundamental state, which we call in spiritual traditions, 'witnessing awareness,' in that witnessing awareness thoughts come and go, emotions come and go, perceptions come and go, feelings come and go, relationships come and go. The molecules of your body change; everything is changing except the observer. So shift your attention from what you're experiencing to the observer of that experience and suddenly you find you’re free! You’re free of all these ups and downs of life, and you’re in a place which is referred to in spiritual traditions as equanimity. That's the highest self-regulation and highest healing.”

“So, in this time, self-care is obviously tremendously important. What foods and habits would you suggest people integrate while in isolation?”

Dr. Deepak Chopra: “Well, there is lots of time right now in isolation, but also there is a need for those of us who can be productive to be productive. So if you can work virtually eight hours a day and keep your schedule the way you do when you work, you can actually be more productive virtually. You can also create better relationships virtually right now. You can call people and give them four days attention, which means listening to them—acceptance, which means telling them you appreciate the gifts that they bring to your life just as they are—appreciation, noticing some good qualities about them, and basically also affection, telling them that you care about them. Try it and you'll feel better. The fastest way to feel better is to make somebody else happy, and you can do that these days, and you can even make amends with people you hurt. Also, forgiveness—so you can increase emotional intimacy right now.”

“If you have the time, for me, especially right now, I'm honing in on my yoga practice, on my breathing practice, on my meditation practice, on my exercise practice, and also I have the ability to reach millions of people, so I'm helping them basically take care of themselves and sharing their experiences. Everybody is sharing their experiences, and this immediately actually makes you feel better.”

“Now, of course, you know there's a lot of economic anxiety, but I am seeing actually people reinventing even their businesses. People in Calcutta or Bangladesh are working for a company in Chicago remotely, and vice versa. So, you know, we are seeing international collaborations in the workforce as well. We are seeing the interdependence of each human being across national boundaries. Social physical distancing can spread the transmission or slow down or stop the transmission of the virus, but we don’t have to be physically distant to actually be together and harness our creative energy and our compassion at this moment. To see when this is all over, how can we create a more peaceful, just, sustainable, healthier, and joyful world?”

“Because at any moment, the world is a projection of our collective consciousness. At any moment, even this—you know, when you talk about coronavirus, coronavirus has been in the ecosystem for tens of thousands of years, if not millions of years, and this is one particular mutation that went out of balance, because honestly speaking, we're not speaking of this, but we have a world that is unsustainable at this moment. You have overpopulation, you have rapid transportation and you know rapid movement of people and goods, we have artificially constructed economic systems, so we are facing right now an existential threat.”

“And we never take our existence lightly; you know, we take our existence for granted. And right now, this is actually telling everyone: don't take your existence for granted. Be grateful for it! Be surprised that you exist! And then, do something meaningful for it, about it! You know what we are also going through, I think, are the stages of grief. When people have extreme loss of anything—you know, they lose a parent, or they’re diagnosed with cancer, or they lose a job, or they lose anything—they go through grief. And that grief, when you have grief, there are certain stages.”

“You know, you first feel victimized—'Why me?' and secondly, you feel angry, and then that can turn into hostility and frustration, and resentments and grievances. But ultimately, because the situation is what it is, you ultimately have to accept it. And if you accept this, then you can also ask yourself, 'What is an opportunity here?' Don’t let a crisis be wasted, because in every adversity, in every crisis, there's an opportunity to find meaning, purpose, and even an opportunity for a bigger healing than you thought of; and I think that bigger healing is possible if we stay centered.”

“We access our intuition which is a deeper knowing of context, meaning, relationships, and stories. We access our creativity, our collective vision. Right this moment, we need a shared vision for a better world; we need emotional and spiritual bonding and supporting of each other; we need the complementing of each other’s strengths and our creativity; and we need love with action. If we combine all these things, we’re totally transparent; we are open to feedback, we have open systems, we share our knowledge, we share our creativity, we share our collective desire for a better world; we will come up with amazing solutions, not only to COVID-19 but many other problems, including radical poverty and social injustice and climate change.”

“Even this pandemic is showing us, you know, look outside! The air is cleaner; the skies are clearer, you can see the stars. The nice people are breathing better in Bangalore and Hyderabad because pollution is down from the Punjab. You can see the Himalayas; the fish are returning to dead lakes, the oceans are bluer, and the stars are brighter. Nature is sending a message. It's saying, ‘Humans, we made you return to your cages so we could repair the ecosystem. We could repair the biosphere. And so, when you come back into this, come as worthy guests, not as predators.’”

Victoria Montgomery Brown: “Question before we turn to the audience questions: you say the ultimate healing includes loss of fear of death. What does that mean?”

Dr. Deepak Chopra: “Well, that's the ultimate primal fear that everyone has, and it happens when you first become aware of even the fact of death. So, you know, I became aware of the fact of death when I was six years old, and my grandfather suddenly passed away, and he was cremated the next day. His ashes were brought in a jar about this big, and I wondered what had happened to my grandfather; where did he go? That started my spiritual journey at the age of six.”

“I never took existence for granted, and that's why I went to medical school as well. I think right now what has happened is because of the COVID-19 pandemic and the fact that young people are also dying suddenly— that essential anxiety, which is a human condition anyway, because only humans are aware or conscious or can imagine the future, and therefore, they have this fear of death is coming through for everyone. Spiritual practices allow us to go to that part of our soul.”

“Now, enough in a physicalist interpretation of the world—in a secular interpretation of the world—many people don’t even talk about the soul. So in cognitive science, many people refer to this deeper aspect of ourselves as consciousness or as the conscious being that is having the experience of mind and body and the world. You are a conscious being having a physical and mental experience. By transcending thought and through practices of self-realization and self-inquiry, we can get in touch with that part of yourself.”

“Never mind what people call it—fundamental reality, soul, spirit, mind, God, Brahman, singularity; it doesn't matter what you call it. There’s a part of yourself that is not in time, and when you experience that part of yourself—there’s no death! You realize that that happens to experiences, not to you. And experiences—including thoughts—thoughts are born; they die as soon as they're born. So our emotions, so our physical bodies, you know, the body is a changing process that is experienced perceptually.”

“What is that which never changes? That is called 'I am.' And when you get in touch with that, there is no fear of death! Now, if you look at the great religions of the world—all the religions of the world, irrespective of where they came from—you will find the religious experience, not the religious ideology or the religious dogma, but the religious experience actually consisted of three things. One was, number one, transcendence—you went to a place which only people who have peak experiences can tell you what it is. It's like a peak performance, and actually it has or an experience of extreme joy and extreme ecstasy because you have transcended the world of space, time, and causality.”

“Number two, there's the emergence of platonic values like truth, goodness, beauty, harmony, love, compassion, joy, equanimity. And number three, there is the loss of the fear of death. That is what is real spiritual experiences, and right now, many people are wanting to have that experience because they are experiencing existential anxiety. Existential anxieties, I see, clearly; just stepping into the unknown are the same thing.”

“So right now, because what we call the known is disappearing, you know, it was also all—but there is no such thing as the known, by the way. What is known is past. It is finished; it doesn't exist. We are living in the unknown all the time. So, if you can step into the unknown, be still and ask yourself, ‘Who am I?’ you’ve started your spiritual journey—the acceptance of yourself exactly as you are and acceptance of other people exactly as they are. And if you can do that, you have gone beyond your ego, because your ego is always wanting to be right, and you spend your entire lifetime defending yourself or attacking somebody else, or justifying yourself.”

“So go and give up being right and practice love in action and be an observer of your own behavior. That’s it! And you have started your journey! It depends on how we deal with it. You know, if you think we are running out of time, then your biological clock will speed up. If you think you have all the time in the world, your biological clock will slow down. If you transcend thought, your biological clock will stop for that moment. Anyway, you know, when you fall in love, when you look at a beautiful scenery, when you see your firstborn for the first time, when you look across at the Grand Canyon, look at the Milky Way galaxy—for that single moment, time stops, because you, the scenery and the sheer, become one; the lover and the beloved become one; the observer and the observed become one—which is the ultimate reality anyway—that we are all part of singularity; we are all differentiated expressions of a single awareness which is the fundamental ground of all existence. So your biological clock is the movement of thought; the movement of emotion is the movement of perception. When you transcend that, there’s no time!”

An audience question follows: “For those of us who might be hypochondriacs, how can we tune into our bodies without panicking?”

Dr. Deepak Chopra: “Observe your hypochondria, and if you find that difficult, just be in touch with the sensations in your body. You know what we call anxiety or fear or emotional turbulence is a thought that is linked to a sensation in the body. So, when you turn your attention to the sensations in the body, you take your attention away from the thought; you disrupt this link and suddenly you find that you are at ease and the hypochondria also dissipates.”

He continues, “One way to understand peak performance is to talk to athletes and acrobats and ballet dancers and musicians and anyone who is engaged in some great artistic endeavor like producing music, or listening to music, or great symphonies, or great architecture. What you find, in that moment when people have peak performance or a peak experience, there are certain things that happen—there's no resistance, there's no anticipation, there's no regret; there is no ego—there is just this moment exactly as it is, and it is joyful.”

“Sports people also tell me in peak performance. Professional athletes will tell you that they can't hear any sound, everything quietens down, even though people are making a lot of noise in the stands. Taken together, everything goes into slow motion. This experience—peak performance, peak experience—occurs, as I've said, in many situations: sports, being in nature, falling in love, the baby looking at the Grand Canyon, or being just wanders trust and in all hope and wonder of existence. This gives you a glimpse into what is really happening, but you can cultivate this experience just by being present to every experience as it happens and not judging it.”

“And when you start replacing peak performance with peak living and peak living with transcendence, then you have realized yourselves beyond what we call space, time, and causality.”

Victoria Montgomery Brown: “How would you try and change that thinking, or is that important?”

Dr. Deepak Chopra: “You know, we hide behind these terms. I think the very fact that we exist is very magical. If I ask you to lift your hand up like this, that's magical—how did he do that? You know, how do we walk, how do we speak, how do we think, how do we sleep, how do we move our bowels? How do we evoke an image? No one knows! No one has any idea about how we experience anything, leave alone how we exercise choice, volition, and creativity. It's all magical! Existence is magical! If you're not perpetually surprised by existence, then your humanity is incomplete.”

“Now, of course, human beings have this desire to explain everything, so we come up with explanations: mathematics, biology, physics, science. But what we explain is very little. No science can tell you—even while you’re curious—no science can tell you why you experience bewilderment, or surprise, or mystery, or love, or compassion, or self-inquiry. It’s all magical! It's totally magical! Existence is magical! Why do we exist?”

“And even if we exist, we also have awareness of existence, because if you didn't have awareness of existence, then we wouldn't know we exist. The whole thing is magical! So I say embrace. Exchange your cleverness for bewilderment! Enter the mystery door of magic and wonder and curiosity, and you will be holy and you will be healed. Don't be so cocksure about your facts.”

Victoria Montgomery Brown: “Do you think COVID-19 is a karmic wake-up call, a kind of karmic retribution?”

Dr. Deepak Chopra: “See, I don't like to think in those terms. I don't believe in direct cause-and-effect, which is another very linear, rational way to try and explain away things. So right now, oh, is it a karmic penalty we are paying? Is it a Chinese conspiracy? Is this biological warfare? Is it the meat markets of China and the wild animals, etc.? It's everything! It's the fact that the ecosystem is, at this moment, stretched—this rapid transportation, this industrial food production, its economic imbalance in the world, its social injustice, its war, terrorism; everything is the cause of everything.”

“And until we go to a deeper level of knowing that everything is contextual, relational, and that solutions are not one thing—vaccine, or whatever—or just washing your hands—all those things are very important; don’t minimize that. But when we come out of this, we have to ask ourselves: What can we do to repair the biosphere? Because we are an expression of the biosphere. The biosphere is us; we call it the environment, but it’s our extended body. That air is your breath; those trees are your lungs; the earth is recycling it, your body; the rivers and oceans are your circulation, and the stars and galaxies made the atoms in there and force them in supernovae, and they’re now recycling through your body.”

“So, you have a personal body, and you have a universal body, and they’re both equally yours. And unless you learn to respect and consider sacred all of life and existence, these things are going to be part of our ecosystem. So there's no such thing as a naturally built economic system. We actually created the whole idea of economics. Money is a human invention, as is Wall Street, as is trading. These are all human inventions. Originally, before we invented money, there was bartering, you know: you cut my hair and I’ll give you my chicken or whatever; you fix my shoes, and I’ll clean your house.”

“Well, that became too inconvenient, so we developed instruments of debt, which we call money, and then we developed instruments of debt for debt, which we call, you know, whatever—derivatives. And so, we created a totally artificial global economy and now we are recognizing how artificial it is and how fragile it is—how fragile is the global economy that, you know, even the threat of a virus can bring it all down like a house of cards?”

“The economic ideals of society are not bad—whether they are capitalism or socialism or even communism; the ideals were good, you know? The ideas were good! Free market systems would bring out the best in you. Communism said we want to treat everybody fairly; socialism said let us give them benefits like retirement and social security—all great ideas! But humans are greedy and humans are fearful, and so no economic system will be good as long as we act out of fear and greed.”

“We first have to address the fact that there is social injustice in the world, there is economic injustice in the world, there is racial injustice in the world. And once we start to address the bigger problems, the economics will take care of itself. And in fact, right now is the opportunity for a global economy, and in fact reminding us that this turn for extreme nationalism, isolationism, and trade wars is totally misguided and will only worsen the situation. We have a common challenge right now—COVID-19—so let’s come together economically for that, and then for everything else, because it works when you come together.”

“Do you think meditation can change the world around us? And if more of us were meditating, would those psychological efforts impact the world?”

Dr. Deepak Chopra: “The short answer is yes! There's no social transformation in the absence of personal transformation. Peace can only be created by those who are peaceful, not by peace Nobel laureates. You know I’ve known them all; they’re extremely unpeaceful. Now, I don’t—most of them are not peaceful; they’re peace activists, and many of them are angry peace activists, which is a paradox in itself.”

“Peace can only be created by those who are peaceful. Love can only be created by those who have loved. And so, personal transformation comes first, then social, and then collective, and ultimately the world change, because the world is a projection of our collective consciousness.”

“Happiness is a component of well-being; a lot of people who are well physically, and that their normal blood pressure, cholesterol, whatever—healthy relationships—but they're scared! They're scared of old age; they're scared of infirmity; they're scared of death. So they're not happy! Happiness is a complex phenomenon based on whether you have meaning and purpose in life, whether you feel safe and secure and empowered, whether you have love and relationships, and that gives you fulfillment, and when you have creative expression, and where you are in touch with your higher self and a higher calling, then you’re happy. So happiness is a complex outcome of several other outcomes; it is the final goal of all goals.”

“And health and well-being are a component of that, but health and well-being do not guarantee happiness, nor does money. And can we use this collective experience?”

Dr. Deepak Chopra: “I would love that! I hope that we can all use this experience to create a better world for ourselves and our children and their children because right now, the world we have created is hinting at our extinction. You know, if for all the viruses and all the bacteria and all the bugs on our planet disappeared today, life could stop in five years. Humans disappearing from our world today? Life could flourish in five years! So, who is the dangerous predator on this planet? The bugs? The viruses? Or human beings? Ask yourself that question! Reflect on that and see what you can do about it.”

Victoria Montgomery Brown: “Thank you so much!”

Dr. Deepak Chopra: “Thank you! We’re doing this quite regularly, so people liked it. We have another webinar in a conversation with Navy SEAL Chris Fussell at 11:30 eastern time on Friday. And again, thank you so much, Deepak.”

Dr. Deepak Chopra: “Thank you, Victoria. Thank you very much.”