The question inevitably comes up. Why is humanity stuck in P-B? Why do we continue to seek security, sensation, and power if they are so ultimately unsatisfying? Why would we continue to behave in an unsustainable, self-destructive way and create so much suffering for ourselves? Here is the answer.
The intellect in P-B is severely limited by the context of the story and engages in what Nobel Prize winner Sir John Eccles would call “premature cognitive commitments.” Eccles is a neuro-physiologist who studies the mechanics of perception. He contends that, “…there are no colors in the real world, or smells, textures, or scents; they are structured in our awareness. Such perceptions are leading to the overthrow of the ‘superstition of materialism’ that the world is made up of matter and contains objects that are separated from each other in space and time. Everything is ultimately made up of atoms made up of particles moving at lightning speed around empty spaces. These particles are not material objects, but fluctuations in a field of energy. The cells communicate with each other through the language of neuropeptides, which are the biochemical equivalent of thought….”
The universe is pure energy; we are pure energy; all of creation is pure energy, existing beyond space and time. So in P-B we make a premature cognitive commitment by identifying with form including our mind, body and emotions and get stuck there, get mesmerized by the sensations which we take for reality. Trapped in this illusion we actively repress our intuitive wisdom, shut down our guidance system and “prematurely commit” to the illusion of P-B before we can receive the information from the implicate order that would guide us to Simple Reality.
Deepak Chopra continues our explanation. “We are not physical machines that have learned how to think. We are, in fact, impulses of intelligence, thoughts that have learned how to create the physical machine. That consciousness interacts with its own self and ultimately creates both mind and matter. It is consciousness that conceives, governs, constructs, and actually becomes the physical body and ultimately the whole universe. In other words, to think is literally to create.”
The “thinking” described here by Deepak Chopra is not the thinking that our intellect does in P-B. That thinking is controlled and directed by the delusional false-self preoccupied with preserving and extending the survival strategy which seems to get us what we desire (craving) and protect us from what we fear (aversion).
So the premature commitment is to take our instinctual behaviors (false-self survival strategy) and add our beliefs, attitudes and values coming from the story we were born into (the collective unconscious). We then make the mistake of adding the contents of the personal unconscious (including the content of the shadow), and finally add the input of our sensory apparatus and there you have the recipe for the disaster that you see unfolding around you every moment of every day. We dare not continue committing to that paradigm or we will be blocked from what Chopra calls the field of infinite possibilities, the magical realm of Simple Reality.
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References and notes are available for this essay.
For a much more in-depth discussion on Simple Reality, read Simple Reality: The Key to Serenity and Survival, by Roy Charles Henry, published in 2011.
