 Deepak Chopra discusses the quest for God and the current hightened search for spirituality.
There certainly seems to be something happening on a larger level. Like no other time in history, it seems people are taking the search for meaning into their own hands. Have you sensed a change, and if so, why now?
Ever since we appeared on this planet, even as primitive tribes, we asked the following questions: Where did I come from? What am I doing here? Does my life have any purpose? Does God exist, and if God exists does he or she care about me? Do I have a soul? What happens to me after I die? Basic questions in every society.
In olden times this was easy to answer. In the West, God's a dead white male in the sky. You can picture him with a big long beard, and he's over there. And he's watching you and he's judging you. And he'll reward you and he'll punish you, etc. He's a dysfunctional parent.
And in the East it wasn't any different. You had all these other gods and goddesses who were projections of the human imagination, who could only be projected from the state of awareness of trying to survive. And in that state all we could imagine is a protector, and the protector as I said was a dysfunctional parent relationship.
Now, we still have the same dilemma. Science has gradually nibbled away at every belief that we have. The anxiety is still there, the angst is still there. It's much more, though, because those questions will not go away and we still have that need for meaning and purpose. We're the only nervous system that is conscious of our consciousness, and we wonder where it came from. And at the same conscious level it is modulating this intense desire to understand, to transform, to know.
Our unconscious motivations lie in the sub-manifest domain of our awareness and they trigger these processes, and that's what's going on at a collective level. It's part of a wave of consciousness that is a phenomenon at a deeper level. And like any ripple in eternity, it's a beginning, a middle and an ending. And we're in the middle of it right now. In part due to the baby boomers who never accepted the status quo; they didn't accept war during the whole Vietnam era. They were the ones that spawned feminism. They started the ecology movement. They are now middle-aged and refuse to believe it. They are soon going to confront their mortality and want to know what lies beyond the curtain. It's an extraordinary generation, this whole generation of the `60s that I grew up with.
Photographer: Phil Date
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