How to Know God
About This Book
How to Know God is Deepak Chopra's most ambitious and philosophically complete spiritual work — a systematic investigation into the nature of divine experience that attempts to ground it in the emerging neuroscience of consciousness, the insights of quantum physics, and the wisdom of the world's contemplative traditions simultaneously. Chopra proposes that the brain contains seven distinct biological responses to the divine — seven neurological modes of processing reality that correspond to seven different conceptions of God and seven different spiritual experiences — and that these modes are not mutually exclusive but represent successive stages in the evolution of consciousness toward increasingly complete apprehension of the divine reality.
The seven responses move from the reflexive fear-based experience of a deity who punishes transgression (the God of survival and threat response) through progressively more refined conceptions — the God of reactive emotions, the restful awareness of deep meditation, the intelligent creator, the loving deity of mystical union, the God of pure intuition — to the final level where the distinction between God and the individual dissolves entirely in the recognition of universal consciousness as the only reality. What makes the book distinctive is Chopra's consistent attempt to show that each level of the spiritual journey corresponds to a specific neurological mode — that the question 'how to know God' has a neuroscientific answer as well as a spiritual one, and that these two kinds of answer are not in conflict but are describing the same process from different perspectives.
What You'll Learn
• Understand the seven levels of the God-response: what characterises each level experientially, what neurological processes correspond to it, what conception of the divine it generates, and what spiritual traditions have most completely developed the insights available at each level
• Grasp the relationship between neuroscience and mysticism that Chopra develops: how the brain's capacity for higher states of consciousness is genuinely revealed by the science of neuroplasticity and meditation research — and why this scientific grounding strengthens rather than diminishes the credibility of the mystical experiences that the traditions have described
• Recognise the evolutionary dimension: how the seven levels represent not merely different opinions about God but genuinely different levels of consciousness development — and how evolution (both individual and collective) proceeds naturally from the lower toward the higher levels as consciousness expands its self-understanding
• Learn the specific practices associated with each level: what Chopra recommends for deepening the experience available at one's current level and for opening to the next — with particular attention to the practices that facilitate the transitions between levels, which are often the most challenging and transformative moments on the spiritual journey
• Appreciate the ecumenical vision: how How to Know God presents a framework within which different religious traditions — apparently contradicting each other in their God-concepts — can each be understood as appropriate to a specific level of consciousness development, making the differences between traditions a resource for understanding rather than a source of conflict
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