What does spirituality have to do with physical health?
For years, medical experts have wondered about the relationship between spirituality and health. In this video, Dr. Chopra shares his theories about how spirituality can affect physical health.
Transcript
DEEPAK CHOPRA: All spiritual traditions and all religions are based on what we might call a religious experience.
The founder of the religion had an experience, was excited about it, told everybody else and others, then bought the belief even without having
their own experience. But if you look at the religious experience, if we look at William James's writings,
or you even look at the founders of religion, there are three things that stand out. One, there is an ineffable experience of transcendence,
and that transcendence is going beyond the subject, object, spirit. You have a sense of connection to all that exists.
You cannot articulate it. Abraham Maslow called it the peak experience. and people have that in art, they have it in music,
they have it in dance, they have it in theater, they have it in sex, they have it in nature. We watch sports because we like to vicariously experience
the same thing. But, you know, in a simple sentence, the beauty of the mountain was breathtaking, time stood still.
You and the mountain became one. The lover and the beloved became one. The music and the musician, the dancer and the dance.
It's an experience which spiritual traditions call unity consciousness. Now that might be clothed in the language and mythology
of the time. I and the father are one, OK? Moses spoke to God, whatever.
That's cultural. As our mythology expands with a deeper understanding of nature, we can couch it in other terms.
And that's definitely a common theme. The second common theme is that as a result of that experience
of unity, going way beyond the divided mind, there's the spontaneous emergence or experience of what
we call platonic values-- truth, goodness, beauty, harmony, joy, love, compassion,
profound peace, the peace that passes understanding, equanimity. And then there's a third component
that gives you a glimpse of that which is eternal, which is not in spacetime, OK?
That there's something that is outside of this world of spacetime and causality.
I can give you the science behind this because that's my interest, but with these three experiences comes, very dramatically,
also a movement of your biology in the direction of homeostasis. Now every biological organism, by the way,
has self-repair mechanisms. Homeostasis, feedback loops. And there are hundreds of them.
You have a feedback loop for blood sugar, for body temperature, for hormones. Just about every function in our biology,
there's a self-repair mechanism, self-regulatory mechanism. So there's something that feeds back.
You might say energy and information feedback and regulate themselves. A healthy body is in a state of dynamic non-change
in the midst of change. My intuition always has been that spiritual healing is nothing but going back to a baseline state.
life family
Browse videos by topic categories
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z
ALL