Enlightenment, the Universe and the whole shebang? When Deepak Chopra comes to town, everything is possible, as Margaret Evans discovers.

On this weekend in mid February, most of us could be forgiven for feeling a bit down, vaguely aware that our comfortable existence had been thrown a degree or two off kilter.

When we chose to think about it, the reasons were all too obvious - after all, we were still absorbing the grim warnings of calamitous climate change from a UN report which polled 2000 scientists, a report that came hot on the heels of An Inconvenient Truth; we'd barely had a drop of rain for months in any part of the country that needed it; our politicians and power brokers were up to their usual tricks only now we were finding out about them. Even our sporting heroes had temporarily dropped the ball!

Yet, by the end of the weekend, the 300 or so people who'd filled a conference room in Sydney's Convention Centre at Darling Harbour came away knowing that their own personal world had changed - and perhaps much more as well. The gloom had palpably evaporated as we gathered in groups to share our thoughts and newfound hope and even exhilaration. I can't speak for everyone, but everyone I spoke to felt the same subtle transformation of his or her life.

The capacity to bring about such change as this among people who, in the main, are already thoughtful and insightful, underlines the influence of Deepak Chopra in our world today. Author of "over 49 books" that have sold 20 million copies in 35 languages and been "translated" into CDs for millions more listeners, recipient of major awards in medicine and science including the Einstein Award, keynote speaker at forums on health, spirituality and peace, one of Time Magazine's 100 icons of the 20th century, "guru" to corporations and individual seekers of truth, Chopra left us knowing that our destiny really is in our own hands - and hearts. And along with the more complex abstractions - our focus for most of the time had been on the discontinuity of the Universe - we came away with practical, achievable strategies, what Chopra calls rituals, to achieve at least some of our goals. As I've often thought in reading his books and listening to that precise but intimate CD voice, Deepak Chopra, in person too, has the enormous gift of understanding the human condition and allowing his compassion to wash effortlessly over us. It's something that can never be forced.

The theme for our weekend was nothing less than understanding the Secrets of Enlightenment as conveyed in Chopra's latest certain-to-be bestseller Power Freedom and Grace.* We could easily have been left floundering in a puddle of confused abstraction deprived of the oxygen of understanding. But our teacher was at pains, perhaps for an hour or so a little laboured, to make sure we got it! And I think we did.

Aware, of course, of the uncertainty we felt had intruded into our lives, Chopra began with the reassuring observation from the Vedas that "there is no creativity in stability". In fact, the greater the instability, the better off we are because it requires that we become more flexible. And as the Vedas first taught thousands of years ago, "Infinite flexibility is the secret of immortality". We felt better already.

Chopra soon warmed to perhaps his key message of the weekend that our path to enlightenment begins with liberating and nurturing our soul. Human beings, he told us, react in one of seven ways to any event or stimulus, the most common being fear or the stress response - "responsible for all the major epidemics of our time like heart disease, cancer and degenerative disorders" - followed by the reactive response in which we try to manipulate the person or situation to our advantage. Sadly, according to Chopra, "99 per cent of people are frozen at this stage and that's mostly true of men. Women do better". And in total synch with the angst of our times he joked "the average CEO or head of a nation is frozen emotionally at the age of eight." Maybe it wasn't a joke.

The remaining five responses, though, all involve the soul, our lifeforce, our chi. At the least evolved level, that of restful or centred awareness, the very act of centering yourself and "getting in touch with your soul" is starting the movement to a higher level of consciousness. Intuition, says Chopra, is the next step up the ladder, what he memorably calls "eavesdropping on the intelligence of the Universe". In opening to an intuitive rather than clinically reasoned response, we are already going into the depth of our soul and calling on the holistic nurturing wisdom of the Universe. This deepens further in the creative and then visionary responses where we tap into the wisdom of our spiritual ancestors, the collective archetypal intelligence. The seventh level of sacred response is the enlightenment to which so many aspire. But as we detect within ourselves some progress along this sevenfold path (surely we've all felt that intuitive response even if we haven't acted upon it) what once seemed the preserve of holy men sitting at the top of mountains seems at least within our more down to earth realm.

Easily, effortlessly, then we touch on the first of Deepak Chopra's secrets of enlightenment - that there are hidden dimensions to our existence. Beyond our personal soul we tap into our archetypal inheritance and, beyond that, into the universal domain. It's here that a less caring presenter could have lost us irretrievably in the vastness of the firmament. But instead we find ourselves engaging with the mystery of non-locality, that intriguing concept of a discontinuous Universe.

As Chopra explains it, while everything we see appears as a solid entity - ourselves included - in fact we're all a constant energy pulse: "We're going on and off at the speed of light and so is everything else." That beautiful red rose our lover gives us and which heightens our senses is, just as our lover is, a vibration, much like a movie is a beam of hundreds of thousands of separate images flying by so quickly as to appear seamless. But who are we to complain? Somebody's set us eternally vibrating too! It's this "on/off" signal that creates our physical world, every last bit of it. And, says Chopra, while science has got a handle on what's in the on signal, it's what's in the off part that is truly exciting - "it's the most important question in science today." This, then, is the discontinuity of the Universe, the sense of a colourless, massless electrical field with the promise of "infinite possibilities" in the pause between the energy pulses that our unrefined senses fool us into believing is the sum total of reality.

And it's in the off signal - the infinitely mysterious pause - where perhaps our highest Self resides and who knows what else besides. Acclaimed English astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington, director of the Cambridge Observatory who earned high praise from Albert Einstein for his mathematical treatment of the Theory of Relativity, was one who sensed the mystery in his phrase: "Something unknown is doing we don't know what".

Suddenly all of the quantum universe, so familiar to us now from What the Bleep Do We Know? and Down the Rabbit Hole opens up before us as this extraordinary realm of "infinite possibilities". Deepak Chopra quickens his normally measured delivery as he reels off what could be there for those who seek beyond the limitations of our social conditioning - in the past, a coterie only of "sages/psychotics and geniuses".

Possibility waves allow the "immeasurable potential" for synchronicity - or to use Chopra's expression "non-local correlation" - meaning events that occur outside the space-time nexus as we currently understand it. They give credence to the idea of one domain of existence, the idea of the oneness of our Universe - and if we need proof of this reality we need look no further than the human body, says Chopra. The one hundred trillion cells that compose each of us is proof positive of the synchronicity within just a single living organism - we learn that it takes 100 cells in the heart to beat synchronistically for a pacemaker to work. Other examples of nature's non-local behaviour include crickets chirping in unison, schools of fish and flocks of birds weaving and turning as one, several million horseshoe crabs emerging on the same full moon night to mate, even sperm wagging their tails!

Deepak Chopra's second secret of enlightenment, "The world is within me; I am not in the world" suddenly attains a crystal clarity! Others such as "Every life is spiritual", " I live in multidimensions" and, most challenging perhaps, "Death offers opportunities for quantum leaps in creativity and evolution" also seem attainable. Chopra's comments on death were among the most thought provoking of the weekend: essentially, he told us, death is quantum creativity and there is no creativity without death. In Power Freedom and Grace, for instance, we learn that the human body replaces 98 per cent of its atoms in less than a year, we gain a new stomach lining every five days, a new skin every month! Cancer is the inability of cells to die! But if we subscribe to this visionary thinking, physical death is that period in the non-local (spiritual) domain before the next quantum leap of creativity which takes us to rebirth or reincarnation. And as we wait, cooling our heels, we're stored as possibility waves. I suspect this is something those Eastern sages and certainly those who wrote the Vedas intuited long ago!

A weekend in the stimulating presence of Deepak Chopra is not something taken lightly, nor easily forgotten. How often to we get to share such insights into life, the universe and everything? Oh, and along the way, acquire strategies to raise our self esteem, release our soul, identify our life's purpose, improve our interpersonal relationships, find the calm of a do-anywhere meditation, laugh, wiggle our hips and share experiences, and know that our lives have changed. In place of that out-of-kilter sensation, there is now the promise of a calm balance and the freedom it brings.

To register as a participant in the Alliance for a New Humanity inspired by Deepak visit www.anh.global.org
For more on Power Freedom and Grace read NOVA's December 2006 issue Vol 13 No 10 "Grace".