by Deepak Chopra, M.D: Are you evolving personally?
This question is at the heart of a new book I’d like to introduce you to titled Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential. In it, I propose that a leap in personal evolution is open to everyone if only you are shown how evolution works.
What Is Evolution?
Evolution is a term that generally means progress. If you ask yourself whether you have made progress over the years, you are very likely to say yes. Evolution also connotes change. Would you say that your life has changed over the years? Again, it is very likely you’d say yes.
But the most important quality in evolution is the ability to take creative leaps. This would give most people pause. You may still tend to assign creativity to a special class of artists—not to everyone—and leaps seem to be available only to the brave. These are the notions I want to change in Metahuman.
How Your Own Story Holds You Back
The basic thing holding everyone back from creative leaps is that you live by stories constructed in your minds, and you spend a lifetime defending your own story. At this moment, if you take an honest look at yourself, you are defining yourself with labels that pertain to class, religion, race, social position, gender, family upbringing, and bad things in your past you never want to repeat.
When you want to change and conditions are right, you will find ways to move forward, but in essence, you are just altering your story. Even if you dropped everything, fled to another country, and took on a new identity, you would only be switching one story for another. The problem with all stories is that the mind is limiting itself, and when this happens, reality shrinks to the size that fits your conception of yourself.
It sounds scary to have no story, like being someone without an identity, but this is a false fear. We’ve all had joyous moments when you felt free, unbounded, open to all possibilities, and totally secure inside. These are glimpses of life outside the boundaries of a story. This is the life I call metahuman, based on the Greek word “meta”, which means beyond. To be metahuman is an evolutionary leap that takes you beyond your story.
What Lies Beyond Your Story?
What lies beyond? Infinite possibilities. That’s not an exaggeration. At this moment, nothing keeps you from having a thought you never had before or speaking a sentence you’ve never said before. Language connects you to infinite possibilities of expression. This isn’t an inflated claim or a frightening one.
Language is a tool that consciousness uses, and there are other tools that are just as full of possibilities as words and thoughts:
- Curiosity
- Discovery
- Intuition
- Insight
- Creativity
The place where you can meet infinity first hand is in consciousness. Therefore, the leap to metahuman is about one thing: making the unconscious part of your life conscious. A human being can be defined as a species of consciousness that is both aware and self-aware.
Once you dedicate yourself to the process of becoming more aware and self-aware, beginning with meditation, your intention to evolve will be answered. Truth, new possibilities, and creative openings will come to you when you open yourself to them.
The opposite of being open is the habit of sticking to your story. All stories are invented in the past; therefore, if you stick to your story then you are fated to keep repeating the past, which is no way to live compared with being open to the new, unknown, and untested possibilities in the field of pure consciousness.
Examples of Unconscious Living
Becoming more conscious isn’t a goal like other goals in life. Most goals are about improving your story, not actually evolving. The goal of metahuman is to change unconscious living for conscious living. They are totally different states that permeate every aspect of life. Here are examples of unconscious living:
- You act out of habit.
- You speak without thinking.
- You rely on fixed beliefs and opinions.
- You react reflexively.
- You have decided in advance what you like and don’t like.
- You are beset by unforeseen consequences.
- You embrace conformity.
- You arrive at snap judgments.
- You must try to suppress anger, fear, and other negative emotions.
- You deny things you don’t want to face.
The average life is spent in these unconscious responses, and they are dictated by sticking to your story. The secret to escaping all of these tendencies is to stop believing in stories because even a good story is just a mental construct. Mental constructs can be very useful—medicine, law, economics, and the arts and sciences all depend upon them. But when you get trapped in a fixed conception of yourself, you are living a mind-made illusion.
An Example of Conscious Living
Here is a profile of conscious living when you make the metahuman leap.
- You think before you speak.
- You weigh your options before making a decision.
- You collect facts.
- You anticipate the consequences of your actions.
- You listen to what other people have to say.
- You feel your emotions but don’t always act on them.
- You have impulse control.
- You plan ahead.
- You are open to revising a plan when the situation changes.
- You understand human nature and therefore are more tolerant.
- You don’t jump to conclusions.
- You are non-judgmental.
- You balance conformity with the right to be different.
- You keep your antennae out for the situation around you and the people in it.
- You pay attention.
- You can focus steadily on a problem.
Even a glance at this list reveals that being aware is much better than being unconscious. No one leads a completely unconscious life. There are always glimpses of awareness. But you fail to realize the self-damage that occurs from the part of your life that is unconscious. In reality, your entire story is damaging you by separating you from the field of infinite possibilities.
Living an aware life isn’t exotic or open only to the gifted few. I urge you to explore Metahuman, because it gives explicit guidance in how to make the evolutionary leap that is crucial to true personal transformation. I have no doubt that it is the most important book I’ve written, because only by evolving can the human race save itself, the planet, and every individual on the planet. It’s time to adopt a totally new story, which is no story at all except freedom, love, and creative possibilities for all.
