In most people’s minds abundance and lack are opposites—it is obvious which countries are rich and poor. But even in a wealthy society, abundance meets troubling obstacles of economic and social inequality. The path to success is rocky for nearly everyone, and making more money doesn’t save you from feeling insecure inside. When you combine these factors with the prevailing belief that success depends on hard work, struggle, and fiercely competitive drive, the whole picture is gloomy and at best filled with risks.

I think that the picture is distorted. The secret to abundance lies within, and there is a path to it without struggle achievable by everyone. This is the path laid out in detail in my new book, Abundance: The Inner Path to Wealth . It proposes an inner path that is completely compatible with spiritual growth and personal evolution. Let’s clear away at once the notion that spirituality is the opposite of material success.

The whole thrust of the field of artificial intelligence (AI) is to make machines interact with us more like humans. In practical terms this involves building a computer or robotic device that can take over a human task and do it just as well or better. But how often do we ask the opposite question: Can AI make us more human?

This is an endlessly fascinating question once you go into it. The reason a machine isn’t human is that it has no interior life—it has no experience at all, while a person’s inner life is the source of everything human. Everything going on “in here” is overwhelming. We constantly think, feel, perceive, worry, dream, wish, remember, create, on and on. At this point, even the most optimistic AI proponent cannot foresee a computer or robot that does any of these things, so how can it make us more human?

Although the word karma has firmly entered common speech, its importance and value is rarely understood. The Sanskrit word karma simply means “action,” but the word implies actions that have consequences. In itself that’s not a foreign concept—in fact, saying that actions have consequences expresses an everyday idea. But the Indian concept of karma is much more subtle and profound. The doctrine of karma includes the following implications:

• Every action leads to a result, however unpredictable.
• These results are calculated by a kind of cosmic computer that balances everything in Nature.
• The consequences of your actions are not randomly good or bad—they are organized in an evolutionary way to move your forward.
• “Good” karma actually means evolutionary karma. “Bad” karma is the opposite—it suspends or delays your forward motion or growth.
• Karma exists to preserve the memory of the past so that nothing is lost.
• No karma is random

If you put these ideas together, they form a doctrine that goes far beyond “everything happens for a reason.” The reason is evolution. This in fact is why the doctrine of karma originated, so reveal that despite the ups and downs of everyday life and the random reactions we have to everything that happens to us, there is a larger karmic pattern.

In difficult times life seems to be full of risks and attempting to avoid threats is the only strategy anyone seems to follow. We fear worst-case scenarios, and almost automatically worst-case scenarios become a habitual way of looking at the world. No matter how much you try to avoid risks, however, and minimize threats, happiness is degraded by anxiety. If you grow old and look back on your life saying, “I was extremely careful,” that’s not the same as looking back and saying, “I created a happy life for myself.”

There is no more important question than the following: Is Nature on the side of human beings? If you answer immediately without a second thought, your answer is very likely to be no. The reasons behind the answer are emotional—the power of the weather, just to mention one force of Nature, is terrifying in its might. Someone with a scientific bent would support a “no” with two plausible arguments. The first argument is that natural forces operate at random and have done so for 13.8 billion years, the current estimate for the age of the cosmos.

Every spiritual tradition, East or West, speaks about waking up as an essential part of progress on the path. Whether the goal is God, enlightenment, or the experience of bliss, it is blocked because almost everyone is asleep. But the injunction to wake up is vague and clearly not meant literally—we think we are awake unless we are asleep in bed. It’s very important, then, to clarify what it exactly means to wake up.

The most basic need in anyone’s life is to feel safe. All other attainments are built from this baseline. If you usually feel safe, you are likely to be more productive in your life. But we can all remember times when there were serious setbacks. Then a downward spiral can develop. Whatever the emotion that overtakes us—feeling weak, unwanted, desperate, dejected, or anxious—there is one common element: We feel isolated and alone.

In surprising ways, the notion of enlightenment is important in everyday life. In the West, the word “enlightenment” remains fuzzy, and most people would consider it exotic, foreign, difficult to reach, and reserved only for people with strong spiritual motivation and tremendous self-discipline.

If all of these assumptions are wrong, everything surrounding enlightenment would have to shift. In fact, each of these assumptions occupies a spectrum. There are yogic teachings that require strong motivation and enormous discipline, but there are also paths to enlightenment that are much easier, and these fit everyday lifestyles quite well.

Whether you call it personal growth or spiritual evolution, it would be helpful to disentangle the threads of advice, myth, mysticism, outworn traditions, and stubborn conditioning that block a person’s progress. For that purpose, there is one thing needed for personal growth and also spiritual evolution. With this one thing, the experiences of daily life can be easily sorted out and underlying reality revealed.

The name of this one thing is second attention, and even if the term is new to you, you already have second attention. The issue is how to use it. First attention is directed at any experience you might be having. Whatever you are paying attention to right this minute occupies first attention. Reading this post will lead to another experience, perhaps getting up to stretch or have a cup of coffee, and then you might make a phone call, and in this way first attention guides you through your day.

By Deepak Chopra, M.D., Brian J. Fertig, M.D. and Jack A. Tuszynski, Ph.D., D.Sc.

In a rational world, when a mystery presents itself, the mind goes to work to solve the mystery. This approach works very well when it comes to explaining the sudden extinction of the dinosaur or what is making a patient sick, but it works much less well when it comes to the mystery of the human body. All of us are in intimate contact with that mystery, and so we are presented with a choice.

The first choice is to follow the usual rational procedures to understand how the body works. A massive amount of information has been collected in this way. Measurements, data, and research studies pour in every day. But there is another choice that is not well known to most people, which is to live the mystery. There is a stark difference between these two paths, as we will show.

By Deepak Chopra, M.D., Brian J. Fertig, M.D. and Jack A. Tuszynski, Ph.D., D.Sc.

It has been decades since a breakthrough idea changed people’s health and well-being. The last big ideas included risk prevention and “the new old age.” Risk prevention based a person’s health on avoiding specific threats like smoking, poor diet, a sedentary lifestyle, and stress. The new old age was a change of mindset that opened the way for lifelong well-being and productive activity beyond the biblical threescore and ten.

But as useful as these breakthroughs were, they hit a dead end. Risk prevention suffers from noncompliance, the perverse habit we all indulge in of not doing what is good for us. In addition, risks are fearful, and fear is a poor motivator in the long run. The new old age ran into a different and even tougher obstacle. The aging process proceeds roughly at the rate of 1% a year after age 30, much too long a time to focus on old age, even though it has been well established that the afflictions of the elderly are chronic conditions like diabetes, hypertension, coronary artery disease, and probably most cancers which begin to develop years or even decades before symptoms appear.

Deepak Chopra, M.D., Brian J. Fertig, M.D. and Jack A. Tuszynski, Ph.D., D.Sc.

Stress has been a familiar term for decades, and the problems caused by chronic stress are legion. There is no reason to continue to put up with the rush and pressure, the demands and crises of modern life, when toxic stress is involved in most lifestyle disorders. No one is immune to stress, and despite the claims of some high-powered, competitive people, no one thrives on stress. What, then, can be done?

First, we need to get beyond the popular use of the term. When people say that they are stressed out, they mean that undue pressure makes them feel exhausted or overwhelmed. Certainly, this can be true, but stress, medically speaking, is a pressure that pushes the body out of its normal state of balance (or allostasis, and eventually homeostasis), requiring various processes like heart rate, blood pressure, and hormonal balance to kick in so that the stressor, as it is called, can be overcome. For a long time, much emphasis was placed on the stress response in the form of fight-or-flight. The point was made that unlike our remote ancestors, who needed fight-or-flight as a mechanism when under threat from predators, in modern life fight-or-flight is an evolutionary holdover that long ago outlived its usefulness.

The greatest threat now is not from fighting predators, going to war, or facing bodily harm. The greatest threat is from low-level chronic stress, which causes a milder version of the stress response. The full-blown stress response is not sustainable past a brief period, counted in fractions of an hour, at which point a rebound effect automatically occurs, causing the stressed person to feel exhausted and drowsy. This automatic shut-off valve is not present in low-level chronic stress, which can be maintained for days, months, and years, as attested to by people who stay in toxic relationships or endure stressful job conditions.

Deepak Chopra, M.D., Brian J. Fertig, M.D. and Jack A. Tuszynski, Ph.D., D.Sc.

You can’t have a thought, feeling, sensation, or mental image without calling upon your brain, and this close relationship makes us human. Since 100 billion brain cells are constantly generating your mental life, no relationship seems more important, and everyone has a fear in the back of their mind about what might happen in old age if Alzheimer’s strikes, in essence destroying the mind-brain connection.

But as precious as this relationship is, your brain has a more important relationship that was hidden until about twenty years ago. This precious relationship is with bacteria, and even when you are asleep or thinking about nothing at all, the communication never ceases between the brain and bacteria, specifically the bacteria in your gastrointestinal tract (the gut microbiota).

Between them the brain and your GI tract have created a real-life matrix, just like the one in science-fiction. You are alive and relate to your brain inside this tight structure of biochemicals that carry thousands of messages per second between microbiota and brain. At first sight this seems unbelievable, because few life forms have genetics as rudimentary as a bacterium, and no life form has a brain as complex as the human brain. An old proverb says that even a cat can look at a king. Biologically speaking, the lowly bacterium (along with viruses and microscopic fungi) does a lot more than look at your brain, more even than eavesdropping on it.

Deepak Chopra, M.D., Brian J. Fertig, M.D. and Jack A. Tuszynski, Ph.D., D.Sc.

One of the mysteries of human existence is the fact that you do not fly apart into a cloud of atoms and molecules but instead hold together as a living, breathing, thinking organism. It is said that we live on the edge of chaos, because the human body has adapted to counter an enormous range of accidents, mistakes, wounds, illnesses, and stresses that would cause a non-living system to be wrecked.

A simple example is your joints. You bend and unbend your fingers hundreds of times a day. Take a bar of steel and bend it hundreds of times. It will break, which your fingers don’t. In fact, they get better at whatever they are doing, such as practicing the piano, a repeated activity that creates more order even though playing the piano or violin demands unending movements that look random if you happen to be deaf.

The study of chaos has progressed far enough that you can take any phenomenon, from the weather to a beating heart, traffic patterns to brain waves, and study it as the contest between order and chaos. Your life depends on the predictable (orderly) sequence of events that produces a healthy heartbeat, and if the sequence gets out of sync, the heart can go into irregular activity anywhere from a benign irregular heartbeat (arrhythmia) to a random convulsion (fibrillation) that proves fatal.

Deepak Chopra, M.D., Brian J. Fertig, M.D. and Jack A. Tuszynski, Ph.D., D.Sc.

There have been exciting discoveries about the microbiome that lead to a radical change in how we view the human body. “Microbiome” is a new name for something long known about, the teeming colonies of bacteria and fungi that exist all around the body. We need these micro-organisms in order to digest food, but the existence of so-called “intestinal flora” isn’t news either. So why did the microbiome become exciting?

The biggest reason can be summarized as “The microbiome is us.” Instead of being invaders or microscopic hitchhikers, the microbiome represents the continuity of life itself. Microbial DNA is woven into human DNA, which immediately tells us that far from being enemy germs, thousands of species of bacteria, viruses, and fungi brought our ancestors the news of the world as it applies to the evolution of life. A world cloud of DNA moves in, around, and through every living thing.

In natural history museums our hominid ancestors look small and primitive, but there is an invisible link that binds us to them, the microbiome. There are other microbiome locations in the mouth, on the skin, and in the armpits and groin, but let’s limit ourselves to the gut microbiome, since it is incredibly complex, with an estimated 2,000 species of microbial life, and it is life-giving.

Deepak Chopra, M.D., Brian J. Fertig, M.D. and Jack A. Tuszynski, Ph.D., D.Sc.

One of the great failures in science is still haunting us, the failure to discover why living things are alive. One of the most promising theories was known as vitalism, which held that some undiscovered “life force” or “spark of life” is what separates living things like trees, cats, and amoebas from non-living things like rocks, water, and salt. Vitalism was once so promising that the Nobel Prize was given to a champion of vitalism, the French philosopher Henri Bergson, in 1927. But significantly, the prize was in literature, since no one, however enamored of vitalism, could provide scientific evidence for any kind of life force.

The tables were decisively turned to the opposite of vitalism, known as functionalism, which breaks life down into processes like metabolism, growth, reproduction, adaptation, evolution and extinction.. That’s where we find ourselves today, which poses a huge problem. Vitalism and functionalism are opposites, which implies that in the game of either/or, if one is false, the other must be true. But unfortunately, functionalism doesn’t explain life, either. It explains how life behaves, which isn’t the same thing.