CHAPTER 4

  1.     Jalal al-Din Rumi, Maulana. 2011. Selected Poems of Rumi. Translated from Persian by Reynold A. Nicholson. New York: Dover, 43.

  2.     Bloom, Paul. 2004. Descartes’ Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human. New York: Basic Books.

  3.     Bloom, Paul, and Dave Pizarro. 1999. “Homer’s Soul.” The Psychology of the Simpsons. Brown, Alan S., and Chris Logan, eds. Smart Pop, 65–73.

  4.     Bloom, Paul. 2004. “Natural-Born Dualists.” Edge.org. http://bit.ly/29Dm54Y

  5.     Robinson, Howard, and Edward N. Zalta. 2011. “Dualism.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://stanford.io/2ajlwKZ

  6.     Chopra, Deepak, and Menas Kafatos. 2016. “Reality Gets an Unlikely Savior: Infinity.” San Francisco Gate, July 3. http://bit.ly/29jezgN

  7.     Chopra, Deepak, and Menas Kafatos. 2017. You Are the Universe. New York: Harmony Books, 249.

  8.     van Lommel, Pim. 2010. Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience. New York: HarperCollins.

  9.     Kelly, Edward F., and Emily Williams Kelly. 2009. Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 28.

  10.   Martin, Michael, and Keith Augustine, eds. 2015. The Myth of an Afterlife: The Case against Life after Death. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

  11.   Larson, E. J., and L. Witham. 1998. “Leading Scientists Still Reject God.” Nature 394: 313.

  12.   The German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, considered by many to be the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century, persuasively argued that language, thought, and reality cannot be separated. In his groundbreaking 1921 work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein laid out his propositions that “the world is everything that is the case,” that facts about the world are represented in thoughts, then propositions, and finally as language. The words we use to describe the facts about world shape, or even determine how we think about the world itself. “The picture is a model of reality,” he wrote, and that picture is described with words. Thus, Wittgenstein famously concluded, “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

  13.   Pennycook, Gordon, James Allan Cheyne, et al. 2015. “On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-profound Bullshit.” Judgment and Decision Making 10(6): 549–563.

  14.   http://bit.ly/1PQqk6s

  15.   Personal correspondence, February 22, 2016.

  16.   Epel, E. S., E. Puterman, J. Lin, E. H. Blackburn, P. Y. Lum, N. D. Beckmann, J. Zhu, E. Lee, A. Gilbert, R. A. Rissman, R. E. Tanzi, and E. E. Schadt. 2016. “Meditation and vacation effects have an impact on disease-associated molecular phenotypes.” Translational Psychiatry 6, e880; doi:10.1038/tp.2016.164. www.nature.com/tp

  17.   Personal correspondence, September 8, 2016.

  18.   This research was given an additional boost in a second study published in 2016 on the effects of a vegetarian diet, meditation, yoga, and massage on a set of metabolic biomarkers associated with inflammation, cardiovascular disease risk, and cholesterol regulation in 119 men and women participants between 30 and 80 years of age enrolled at the Chopra Center. Blood plasma analyses before and after the six-day program revealed that the half who went through the program showed measurable decreases “in 12 specific cell-membrane chemicals” related to “inflammation and cholesterol metabolism,” both of which are “highly predictive of cardiovascular disease.” Again, it is difficult to tell what is driving the salutary effects: (a) diet, (b) meditation, (c) yoga, (d) massage, or (e) all of the above? I suspect the answer is (e). So while one’s state of mind unquestionably has some measurable effect on one’s state of health, I remain skeptical that “consciousness” is a driving factor, however that would be defined and measured. Peterson, Christine Tara; Lucas, Joseph; St. John Williams, Lisa; Thompson, J. Will; Moseley, M. Arthur; Patel, Sheila; Peterson, Scott; Porter, Valencia; Schadt, Eric E.; Mills, Paul J; Tanzi, Rudolph E.; Doraiswamy, P. Murali; and Chopra, Deepak. 2016. “Identification of Altered Metabolomic Profiles Following a Panchakarma-based Ayurvedic Intervention in Healthy Subjects.” Nature/Scientific Reports 6.32609. doi:10.1038/srep32609.

  19.   Chopra, Deepak. 2015. The Human Universe. http://bit.ly/1VSFaRA

  20.   Chopra, Deepak. 2006. Life After Death: The Burden of Proof. New York: Harmony, 26–27.