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21 March, 2008

AGELESS BODY, TIMELESS MIND



Your body is aging beyond your control because it has been programmed to live out the rules of that collective conditioning. If there is anything natural and inevitable about the aging process, it cannot be known until the chains of our old beliefs are broken. In order to create the experience of ageless body and timeless mind, which is the promise of this book, you must discard ten assumptions about who you are and what the true nature of the mind and body is. These assumptions form the bedrock of our shared worldview.

They are:
1. There is an objective world independent of the observer, and our bodies are an
aspect of this objective world.

2. The body is composed of clumps of matter separated from one another in time and space.

3. Mind and body are separate and independent from each other.

4. Materialism is primary, consciousness is secondary. In other words, we are physical machines that have learned to think.

5. Human awareness can be completely explained as the product of biochemistry.

6. As individuals, we are disconnected, self-contained entities.

7. Our perception of the world is automatic and gives us an accurate picture of how things really are.

8. Our true nature is totally defined by the body, ego, and personality. We are wisps of memories and desires enclosed in packages of flesh and bones.

9. Time exists as an absolute, and we are captives of that absolute. No one escapes the ravages of time.

10. Suffering is necessary—it is part of reality. We are inevitable victims of sickness, aging, and death.

Each assumption of the old paradigm can be replaced with a more complete and expanded version of the truth. These new assumptions are also just ideas created by the human mind, but they allow us much more freedom and power. They give us the ability to rewrite the program of aging that now directs our cells.

The ten new assumptions are:

1. The physical world, including our bodies, is a response of the observer. We create our bodies as we create the experience of our world.

2. In their essential state, our bodies are composed of energy and information, not sold matter. This energy and information is an outcropping of infinite fields of energy and information spanning the universe.

3. The mined and body are inseparably one. The unity that is “me” separates into two streams of experience. I experience the subjective stream of thoughts, feelings, and desires. I experience the objective stream as my body. At a deeper level, however, the two streams meet at a single creative source. It is from this source that we are meant to live.

4. The biochemistry of the body is a product of awareness. Beliefs, thoughts, and emotions create the chemical reactions that uphold life in every cell. An aging cell is the end product of awareness that has forgotten how to remain new.

5. Perception appears to be automatic, but in fact it is a learned phenomenon. The world you live in, including the experience of your body, is completely dictated by how you learned to perceive it. If you change your perception, you change the experience of your body and your world.

6. Impulses of intelligence create your body in new forms every second. What you are is the sum total of these impulses, and by changing their patterns, you will change.

7. Although each person seems separate and independent, all of us are connected to patterns of intelligence that govern the whole cosmos. Our bodies are part of a universal body, our minds an aspect of a universal mind.

8. Time does not exist as an absolute, but only eternity. Time is quantified eternity, timelessness chopped up into bits and pieces (seconds, hours, days, years) by us. What we call linear time is a reflection of how we perceive change. If we could perceive the changeless, time would cease to exist as we know it. We can learn to start metabolizing non-change, eternity, the absolute. By doing that, we will be ready to create the physiology of immorality.

9. Each of us inhabits a reality lying beyond all change. Deep inside us, unknown to the five-senses, is an inner most core of being, a field of non-change that creates personality, ego, and body. This being is our essential state—it is who we really are.

10. We are not victims of aging, sickness, and death. These are part of the scenery, not the seer, who is immune to any form of change. This seer is the spirit, the expression of eternal being.

These are vast assumptions, the makings of a new reality, yet all are grounded in the discoveries of quantum physics made almost a hundred years ago.

***
Source: BOOK ON “AGELESS BODY, TIMELESS MIND” - A PRACTICAL
ALTERNATIVE TO GROWING OLD BY DEEPAK CHOPRA

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