Deepak Chopra Breaks Down Is the World "Real" or an "Illusion"

By Deepak Chopra, MD, FACP, FRCP

The world "out there" is so visible and tangible that it begs us to accept it. Most people would shake their heads at the opposite notion, that the physical world is a mirage. But this is a major sticking point. Many if not most spiritual traditions consider that the average person is bound up in illusions. Depending on what tradition you respect, God's goodness is masked by sin, which is one kind of illusion, or the whole world is Maya, a distraction from divine reality, which is the ultimate illusion.

But whenever opposites are in play, a third way has been overlooked. The contest between "The world is real" and "The world is illusion" will never be settled, to judge by human history over the past two millennia. This leaves an opening for a third way, which focuses on how anything and everything is created.

Quantum theory is intricate and confusing, but it can be believed on two points. First, there is an uncreated state before anything physical pops into the universe; this uncreated state contains virtual reality, which blossoms into space, time, matter, and energy. Second, when you observe a quantum event, its path is unpredictable. Any outcome is possible, according to a range of probabilities. In a simple analogy, when a baseball is flying through the air, its outcome hasn't been determined. Maybe an outfielder will catch it, maybe not. Maybe it will be a foul ball or fly over the fence for a home run. The baseball in flight is like quantum uncertainty, which is only settled once the ball reaches its fate.

Now take these two ideas and merge them. There is an uncreated state that emerges but without a certain path. Now you have a plausible answer to how anything and everything is created. The uncreated state is like a painter staring at a blank canvas and a palette loaded with colors. The possibility of painting any picture exists until the moment when the painter decides what he is actually going to paint.

Going a step further once he knows what to paint, the very first dip of his brush into the first dab of color signifies the whole picture that is going to emerge. Even if the next hundred dabs of the brush on the palette look random, they are in service of a painting that already exists in the artist's mind.