Deepak was on the Ellen DeGeneres show on January 7, 2009 and told us all his New Year's Resolution, or intention for 2009: "To have at least 100,000,000 people join me in taking a vow of nonviolence in thought, speech and action as soon as possible."
Then I got an email from my brother, sending out this vow to everyone on his email list a few days after I decided to take the Vow, myself!
What lovely synchronicity!
This vow embraces the cessation of all forms negativity, criticism, judgment of other people and also yourself.
So this is what many of us intend to do, starting now.
Deepak's book, "Life After Death" is an extension of all the books, tapes and lectures he has given over the years: That we are all spiritual beings living out just one of many physical experiences.
I was raised in a home which espoused metaphysical thought. Life after death was a household belief and my family spoke of these matters openly, sometimes long into the night.
We'd sit around the old round table, sipping coffee or tea, sometimes beer, and discuss and enlarge on the great cosmic meaning of life.
Deepak also says in his "Way Of The Wizard" video that we are all healers, shamans and wizards.
Deepak says that Jonas Salk, who discovered the Polio Vaccine, said that Darwinian evolution theory is obsolete.
The next stage, according to Salk, is the evolution of consciousness.
The fight or flight response was appropriate for Cave Dwellers, but now this response is triggered by imaginary fears, stock market crashes, and by what people say to us.
This in turn causes the epidemic of Cancer and Heart Disease.
Wars, the subjugation of people everywhere and ecological disasters have made the human species predators of Planet Earth, says Chopra.
This means we, the human family, are at risk of extinction.
At this time there is an urgent need for our wizard potential to awaken and in a deux ex machina display, save the world for future generations.
What we all seek is ultimately freedom of mind, body and soul.
In the words of Jesus, we truly need to be in the world but not of the world.
In times gone by, others have walked the way of the wizard: Saints, Philosophers and Sages.
But at this time, wizards are waking up. We may be unknowingly in their presence in supermarket lines, as passer-bys in the street, as the people we watch in busy places.
The journey, says Deepak, begins with one question: Who Am I?
Deepak says we are a conglomerate of ambiguities.
We are the divine and the diabolical.
We are the sacred and the profane.
We are the darkness before the glorious light of the new day.
And beyond these polarities and dualities lies pure joy, unbounded possibility.
It is here we find the secrets of the wizard.
Chopra says there are seven components of being on the wizard journey of awakening.
1. Innocence
2. Birth of the egocentric
3. Birth of the achiever
4. Birth of the giver
5. Birth of the seeker
6. Birth of the seer
7. Birth of the spirit
As these steps yield to greater and greater experiences of freedom, we feel a desire to embrace ourselves and each other as timeless. We may give more out of love and compassion, dropping the need for recognition in the gifts that we give.
Ego surrenders the need to control.
Addictions wane.
We may suddenly see that the soul cannot be squeezed into the confines of a body or a lifetime.
Thus the seeker is born.
The seeker is beginning to find the one she is looking for, and senses that this one is the eternal presence that has always been internally awake, watching and waiting for the seeker to recognize this truth.
She experiences the soul as spirit.
She may experience synchronistic events happening all day long!
She listens and turns her attention to the one who is listening: The eternal listening silent presence.
She comes to know that birth and death are interruptions in the continuum.
The seeker becomes the seer who carries the consciousness of this timeless presence and makes it real.
The seer embodies the consciousness of infinity, finally giving birth to spirit, merging into what Deepak calls "Unity Consciousness" where love is the ultimate truth, where humans and all living beings are perceived as the same One.
"The Cosmos is the Body" becomes the clarion call of this Unity Consciousness, returning all of us to the great ocean of enlightenment.
This, after all, is what life after death is all about.
