The Unconscious Beliefs Deepak Chopra Wants You To Examine

When people read these statements about an ideal life, they immediately assume they are merely someone else’s beliefs, like the beliefs that underlie organized religion. Many would say that the entire issue of spirituality rests upon belief alone.

It is impossible to accept Christianity unless you affirm the divinity of the resurrected Jesus, or so St. Paul declared in his letters to the early churches. It is impossible to accept Buddhism unless you affirm the Buddha’s enlightenment and the existence of Nirvana. In the same way, to accept Yoga, you must affirm your own infinite standing in creation. From the perspective of everyday life, this seems like too much to swallow.

But nothing about the ideal life is a belief akin to religious beliefs. What’s at stake is reality. Beliefs pertain to how you feel about reality. Yoga declares as a fact that every human being is embedded in a field of infinite potential. By squeezing our infinite potential down into small, manageable compartments, we are guilty only of being part of the mainstream of human beings.

But Yoga doesn’t care about the mainstream or about how you have lived in the past. In the worldview of Yoga, the infinite is always with us; in fact, it is our source. Nothing we do to squeeze our lives down to a manageable size has the slightest effect on reality, and the highest reality is what Royal Yoga is ultimately all about.

Adapted from LIVING IN THE LIGHT copyright © 2023 by Deepak Chopra. Used by permission of Harmony Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.