Finding Our Place in Infinity.

Although it has ancient roots, the meaning of infinity remains baffling, and it seems to have absolutely no bearing on everyday life. The mathematics of infinity is complex, but it isn’t simply a very big number or even the biggest number. Infinity means “not finite,” in other words boundless, without limit. What’s remarkable is that such a concept has been applied for many centuries to the very essence of being human.

Infinite numbers are strings of digits that go on forever. However, the concept of infinity is mysterious because it implies something at the heart of creation that is eternal, unborn, undying, beyond description, and intellectually inconceivable. God is shorthand for all of that, but an inconceivable deity is impossible to accommodate in everyday life, so God got reduced to a kind of superhuman in the sky, a father and divine king of creation.

Sweeping infinity under the carpet doesn’t really work, however, as exemplified by the current fashion for the multiverse, which is serious cosmology and a part of pop culture at the same time. The multiverse arose to solve a problem that only infinity seems to solve. The problem concerns the origin of the Big Bang. Our universe originated In the Big Bang, but where did it originate? The pre-created state is unfathomable, and data that precedes the smallest size of the infant universe (known as the Planck scale) doesn’t exist.

In fact, it cannot exist, because whatever preceded the Big Bang is outside the boundaries of time, space, matter, and energy. For science, which is reliant on physical data, this situation is untenable. For the physicalist, not only is the human brain an artifact of time, space, matter, and energy, but the thoughts it produces, including mathematical thoughts, are bound up in the same scheme, which evolved over billions of years after the Big Bang.

The multiverse arose in essence to provide a pre-created state that was conceivable as a kind of cosmic lottery. The idea is that our universe, which contains dozens of improbable events that knit together to create, among other things, human DNA and the higher brain, is just one outcome of this lottery. In its purest form, the multiverse generates infinite universes, each having its own recipe of natural laws, raw ingredients, and unimaginable variants of space, time, matter, and energy.

Since infinity has no boundaries, it can accommodate the longstanding problem of why our universe is so finely tuned that a change of one part in a billion in the Big Bang would have doomed creation as we know it. In an infinite lottery, one part in a billion is nothing; the universe could be fine-tuned to one part in a trillion, or a quadrillion. Moreover, since the mathematics behind the universe is more or less imaginary, the sky’s the limit. From any moment in time, every imaginable event can emerge invisibly except for the event that gets selected to pop up as reality.

We seem to be very far from everyday life, but it is the notion of infinite creative potential that makes things human. The ancient Vedic seers left behind documents proposing infinite worlds spinning out of creation like dust motes dancing in a sunbeam, but they weren’t talking about an imaginary multiverse. Instead, infinity was employed as the only viable way to describe consciousness. The infinite worlds of Vedanta are transformations of consciousness.

Why should consciousness be infinite in the first place? The notion seems mystical, but in fact, it is based on a few fundamental observations. They include the following:

• Thanks to language, our thoughts can be infinite in number. New combinations of words appear constantly, and if you reach the very biggest number of word combinations, you can always add “and,” at the end to keep going.
• Behind language lies awareness, which isn’t a thought. It is the silent ground state from which thoughts emerge. We experience this as the gap between thoughts or the state of quiet mind in mediation.
• Consciousness wasn’t invented by the human mind. The situation is the reverse. First came consciousness, then mind, if we define mind as thoughts, feelings, sensations, and images.
• If consciousness has no definite origin, it seems to come along with existence itself. No one has come anywhere near showing that atoms and subatomic particles, the building blocks of the physical universe, have a mind.
• Since existence is unbounded, applying to everything in the multiverse, consciousness must be unbounded, too.

There are other sequences of thought that arrive at the reality of consciousness as an infinite field of creative potential. The origin stories in every culture provide some explanation of how life and the mind came about. But the honor goes to Vedic India to place the very essence of consciousness into human beings by virtue of simply existing. In other words, the Vedas are an origin story without an origin. Because consciousness is infinite, eternal, unborn, undying, and inconceivable by the human mind, so are we.

Our limited lives disguise our essence. When this disguise convinces someone, then to be human is bounded by physical birth and death. But looking past the disguise, we find our true place in infinity. It is infinity that makes the finite possible. The inconceivable makes the conceivable possible.

When stated baldly, this sounds like pure metaphysics, which science abhors. The ancient Greeks invented the concepts and the words for physics and metaphysics. In their original context, it was metaphysics that had precedence; today, the order is reversed or metaphysics is dismissed entirely. But ironically, the multiverse is nothing if not metaphysical, since it exists beyond the power of physics to comprehend, measure, and collect data from.

I’m fascinated by every facet of these issues, but the human aspect comes first. To know that we have a place in infinity resolves where we belong in creation. Each individual consciousness originates in the infinite creative field of consciousness. That is our peculiar origin, an origin that itself has no beginning or end. When the full implications of infinity are grasped, the very nature of being human is transformed, and higher states of consciousness, far from being exotic and rare, turn out to be our shared birthright.

To read about infinity in detail see my book Metahuman, which lays out in full the creative potential of human awareness.

DEEPAK CHOPRA MD, FACP, FRCP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a whole health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation.  Chopra is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego, and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is the author of over 90 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. Chopra has been at the forefront of the meditation revolution for the last thirty years. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Digital Dharma: How to Use AI to Raise Your Spiritual Intelligence and Personal Well-Being. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.”  www.deepakchopra.com