AN EXCERPT FROM REINVENTING THE BODY, AND RESURRECTING THE SOUL: BY DEEPAK CHOPRA

AGELESS BODY, TIMELESS MIND

Your body has no limits. It is directing all of the universe's energy, inventiveness, and intelligence. The cosmos is currently experiencing via your brain, seeing through your eyes, and hearing through your ears. 

The human body and the human soul are inseparable. All matter, including the body, is a network of energy and intelligence. On a quantum level, human beings are a coalescence of energy in the form of atoms, molecules, cells, and body parts. But on a subjective level, humans are immortal beings of pure awareness. The soul represents the deeper mind and brain that is beyond the reach of the five sense and three dimensions of space.

Your purpose of man is to evolve with the universe.

All of this is not implausible. The human body is already the most sophisticated scientific experiment in the cosmos. We are living on the edge of existence, you and me. Adopting that perspective is our best chance of surviving. Our current state of ever-improving health, longer lifespans, expanding creativity, and a vision of possibilities that science develops quicker and faster is the result of rapid evolution—faster than that of any other life-form on the globe. It is estimated that our physical evolution ended 200,000 years ago. You have no different kidneys, liver, lungs, heart, or heart than a caveman. You do, in fact, have genetic similarities with a banana of 60%, a mouse of 90%, and a chimpanzee of almost 99 percent.

How you invented yourself

You have been inventing your body from the day you were born, and the reason you don't see it that way is that the process comes so naturally. It's easy to take for granted, and that's the problem. The flaws you see in your body today aren't inherent. They aren't bad news delivered by your genes or mistakes made by Nature. Your choices each played a part in the body you created, either consciously or unconsciously.

Here's a list of physical changes that you have made and continue to make. It's a very basic list, all medically valid, and yet hardly any part of your body is excluded.

Every new skill you pick up builds a new neural network in your brain; 

every new idea you have creates a different pattern of brain activity; 

Every mood shift you experience affects every part of your body through "messenger molecules," changing the basic chemical activity of every cell. 

• You can change your skeleton and muscles with each exercise; 
• you can change your daily metabolism, electrolyte balance, and muscle-to-fat ratio; 
• You can affect your hormonal balance with sexual activity and the decision to procreate; 
• You can raise or lower your immune system depending on the amount of stress you endure; 
• Every hour of complete inactivity causes muscle atrophy; and your genes are sensitive to your thoughts and emotions, responding to them in mysterious ways. 
• Every hour of total inactivity creates muscle atrophy.
•  Your genes tune in to your thoughts and emotions, and in mysterious ways they switch on and off according to your desires. 
• Your immune system gets stronger or weaker in response to being in a loving or unloving relationship. Crises of grief, loss, and loneliness increase the risk of disease and shortened lifespan. 
• Using your mind keeps your brain young; not using your brain leads to its decline.

You created your own body using these tools, and you can create a new one at any time. Of course, one might ask, Why haven't we reinvented the human body by now? The issues have undoubtedly been there for a long enough time. The explanation is that it has been far simpler to solve the puzzle's smaller bits than to see it as a whole. Specialties exist in the practice of medicine. An endocrinologist can report on how your endocrine system's stress hormone levels decrease when you fall in love. A neurologist can confirm with a brain scan what a psychiatrist reports as a better mood. Although what you do eat is better absorbed, a dietician might be concerned that you are losing your appetite. And so it does. Nobody is able to supply

More complexity: your body is nothing less than a universe in motion; right now you could be in love, pregnant, running down a country lane, eating a new diet, losing sleep or gaining it, doing better at work or worse. Because the body is so flexible and masterful at multitasking, it's hard to imagine there's any one step to take that could lead to transformation.

Reinventing the body means changing the whole universe.

Making changes to your body is like trying to see the forest through the trees. While her buddy is going through menopause, one individual obsesses about her weight, another prepares for a marathon, and still another has decided to go vegan. Instead of improving kerosene lamps, Thomas Edison invented a new source of light by giving up on fire, which had been the sole human-generated source of light since the dawn of mankind. That was a truly innovative jump. What quantum leap is in store for you if you are the architect of your own body?

Looking back to the source

if we use Edison as our model, the last great reinvention of the body followed certain principles: 

• The human body is a thing.
• It functions as a single, intricate unit.
• With time, the machine breaks down. 
• Microbes, or small machines at the molecular level, such as bacteria, are always attacking the body's machinery. 
• But all of them are outdated notions. If even one of these presumptions was true, the following events

would not be possible: Recently, a new illness known as electro-sensitivity, in which people complain that simply being near electricity causes discomfort and pain. Electro-sensitivity is taken seriously enough that at least one country, Sweden, will pay to have a person's house shielded from the electromagnetic field if they are diagnosed as electro-sensitive.

There is still more research to be done on the common concern that cell phones are harmful to the body, but testing for electro-sensitivity seemed to be a far simpler solution. In one experiment, participants were placed inside an electromagnetic field—which is something we are constantly surrounded by—and asked to describe their feelings while the field was turned on and off. Electromagnetic fields include microwaves, radio and television signals, cell phone transmissions, and power lines. As it happened, nobody performed any better than chance. Individuals who self-reported as electro-sensitive performed no better than the control group, that is, no better than chance.

However, this didn't settle the matter. In a follow-up experiment, people were given cell phones and asked if they could feel pain or discomfort when they placed the phones against their heads. The electro-sensitive people described a range of discomfort, including sharp pain and headache, and by looking at their brains with MRIs, it could be seen that they were telling the truth. The pain centers in their brains were activated. The catch is that the cell phones were dummies and were emitting no electrical signals of any kind. Therefore, the mere expectation that they would be in pain was enough to create pain in certain people, and the next time they used a real cell phone, they would suffer from the syndrome.

Think twice before writing this off as a psychosomatic impact. A person's condition is real, at least for him, if he claims to be electro-sensitive and his brain behaves accordingly. People who suffer from psychosomatic disorders can honestly say that they do. However, to claim that they created the conditions is also accurate. Actually, a far more significant phenomenon—the ebb and flow of novel diseases that might be entirely new—is at play here. Anorexia and associated eating disorders, such as bulimia, are another example. Such diseases were uncommon a generation ago, but it seems that they are becoming more common, particularly among adolescent girls. The prevalence of premenstrual syndrome, or PMS, appears to be declining after a peak. 

When such new disorders appear, the first reaction is always that the victims created a sickness that is essentially imaginary or psychotic. Yet when the disorder spreads, and doctors find that patients cannot turn off the switch that turned the illness on, there can be only one conclusion. Self-created symptoms are real.

During your lifetime this outworn model of the body hasn't changed but has only been tinkered with. So what is your body, then, if it's not a machine? Your whole body is a holistic, dynamic process in support of being alive. You are in charge of that process, and yet no one has given you the knowledge of how you should approach your job. Perhaps that is because the enterprise is immense: it covers everything, and it never stops.

The process of life

Your body is a river that is constantly changing right now, combining hundreds of thousands of chemical alterations at the cellular level. These aren't haphazard modifications; rather, they are deliberate efforts to preserve the best aspects of the past while advancing living. Your genetic code functions akin to an extensive evolutionary history encyclopedia. Your DNA went over the pages before you were born, making sure all the information was there. An embryo is the simplest form of life and begins as a single cell in the womb. It develops into a haphazardly put together glob of cells. The embryo then gradually progresses through the fish, amphibian, and lower mammal evolutionary phases. 

By the time a baby emerges into the world, evolution has overshot the mark. Your brain was too complex as a newborn, with millions of unnecessary neuronal connections built into it, like a telephone system with too many wires. You spent your first few years paring down those millions of surplus connections, discarding the ones you didn't need, keeping those that functioned to make you exactly who you were. But at that point physical evolution reached unknown territory. Choices had to be made that were not automatically built into your genes.

A baby stands at the frontier of the unknown, and its genes have no more old pages left in the encyclopedia. You had to write the next page yourself. As you did so, starting the process of forming a totally unique life, your body kept pace: your genes adapted to how you think, feel, and act. You probably don't know that identical twins, born with exactly the same DNA, look very different genetically when they grow up: certain genes have been switched on, others switched off. By age seventy, images taken of the chromosomes of two twins don't look remotely the same. As life diverges, genes adapt.

Take a simple skill like walking. With each clumsy step, a toddler begins to change its brain. The nerve centers responsible for balance, known as the vestibular system, start to wake up and show activity; this is one area of the brain that can't develop in the uterus. Once a toddler has mastered walking, the vestibular system has completed this phase of its function.

After you grow up, you might want to learn to drive a car, ride a motorcycle, or walk a balance beam. The brain, even though it may be mature, doesn't stop there. Quite the opposite: when you want to learn a new skill, your brain adapts according to your desire. A basic function like balance can be fine-tuned and trained far beyond the base level. This is the miracle of the mind-body connection. You are not hard-wired. Your brain is fluid and flexible, able to create new connections up into very old age. Far from decaying, the brain is an engine of evolution. Where physical evolution appeared to stop, it actually left an open door.

There's a lot more beyond that door than you could have ever imagined, which is why I want to lead you through it. The purpose of your design is to reveal possibilities that are hidden from view without you. I can picture what is likely the greatest feat of balance that a person has ever demonstrated. I'm sure you've seen pictures of it. Acrobat Philippe Petit, a Frenchman, broke through security at the World Trade Center on August 7, 1974. With the assistance of allies, he scaled the roof and proceeded to string a 450-pound rope between the two towers. Petit stepped out onto the 140-foot-long line, using a 26-foot pole to steady himself. The two towers were wavering. Petit was a professional high-wire artist (as he called himself), and he had taken a basic ability of the body, balance, to a new stage.

What would terrify a normal person became normal for one person. In essence, Petit was at the cutting edge of evolution. He made eight crossings on the wire, which was only three-quarters of an inch in diameter. At one point Petit sat on the wire and even lay down on it. He realized that this was more than a physical feat. Because of the unwavering concentration that was required, Petit developed a mystical regard for what he was doing. His attention had to focus without allowing fear or distraction to enter for even a second.

Conclusion 

Deepak Chopra has inspired millions with his profound teachings over the years. His bestselling books have explored the mind/body connection and the power of spirit. With his latest book, he invites you to experience with him the miracles that unfold when we connect the body directly to the awesome mysteries that give life meaning–directly to the soul. When you have completed this journey, after reinventing your body and resurrecting your soul, the ecstasy of true wholeness becomes possible for the very first time.